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THE PICTURE 



g ^ % ^^ 



AND 



THE MEN: 



BEING 

BIOGKAPniCAL SKETCHES OF FKESIDENT LINCOLN AND HIS 

CABINET ; TOGETHER WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OP 

THE CELEBRATED ARTIST, F. B. CARPENTER, AUTHOR 

OP THE GREAT NATIONAL PAINTING, 

THE FIRST EEADIXG 

OP THE 

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 

BEFORE THB CABINET BY PRESIDENT LINCOLN ; 
including also 

An account op the Picture ; an account op tht: Crisis which pro- 
duced IT ; AND AN Appendix containing the Great Proclama- 
tion AND THE Supplementary Proclamation op Jan- 
uary 1, 1863 ; together with a Portrait op the 
Artist, and a Kmt to the Picture. 

COifPILED BY 

FRED. B. PERKINS, 
editor op "the galaxy," formerly one op the editors op the new 

YORK "tribune," AND OP THE NEW YORK "INDEPENDENT." 



1 ttt^tti^ltett !5y .^Q^^ 

A. J. JOHNSON, NEW YORK 

G. & A. C. ROWE, CLEVELAND, OHIO 
C. ALLEN, M.D., CHICAGO, ILL. 

1867. 




Entered, according to Act of Congres?, in the Year 1867, by 

A. J. JOHNSON, 

In the Clerk's Office op the District Court of tub United States 
for the Southern District of New York. 






DAVTE3 & Kent, 

Electrotypers and Stereotypers, 

183 William St., N. Y, 



PREFACE. 



This rapidly- written little book is intended 
to serve as a companion and key to Mr. Car- 
penter's great picture. The sketches of the 
persons whom that picture represents, the ac- 
count of the picture itself, of the crisis which 
suggested it, and of the painter who executed 
it, are all meant to give such information as 
will help to a clearer and fuller understanding 
of the painting. 

The writer has no wish to conceal the fact 
that he is what is called an ''extreme Radi- 
cal ;" but he has sought to oniit himself from 
this subject, and to sketch the persons here 
represented, not with reference to any ap- 
proval or disapproval of his own, but as they 
may justly be believed to have meant while 
laboring honestly to the best of their ability 
for the preservation of the Union, 



IV I'KEFACE. 

The principal authorities used in the work, 
besides some standard books of reference ac- 
cessible to all, are : Mr. Carpenter's own very 
interesting work, " Six Months at the White 
House, '^ a singularly full collection of the 
most graphic and entertaining anecdotes and 
reminiscences ; the lives of Mr. Lincoln by 
Raymond, Holland, Barrett, Crosby, and Mrs. 
Hanaford ; Trowbridge's biography of Mr. 
Chase, entitled " Ferry Boy and Financier j'^ 
and Baker's Life of Seward. 

Technical criticism of Mr. Carpenter's pic- 
ture has been avoided ; as the writer is one 
of the very few persons living who do not 
understand the business of art criticism. 

FRED. B. PERKINS. 
January 2d, 1867. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Life of Fkancis B. Carpenter 7 

The Occasion ]9 

The Picture 32 

President Lincoiji 50 

Secretary Seward 1 14 

Secretary Chase 137 

Secretary Smith 156 

Secretary Welles 159 

Secretary Stantox 164 

Attorney-General Bates 177 

Postmaster-General Blair 180 

Appendix : Tub Proclamations 185 



THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 



F, B. CARPENTER. 

Francis Bicknell Caepexter, painter of the picture 
of " The First Reading of the Emancipation Procla- 
mation by President Lincohi to his Cabinet," is an 
artist of high reputation, having ah-eady painted por- 
traits of Ex-President Tyler, President Pierce, Presi- 
dent Fillmore, Chief-Justice Chase, Secretary Marcy, 
Secretary Seward, Senators Cass and Houston, Attor- 
ney-General Cushing, and many other eminent persons 
besides. Like Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Fillmore, and many 
more of the distinguished Americans who have sat to 
him, Mr. Carpenter was born in humble circumstances, 
and has earned his own prosperity and reputation by 
good conduct and hard w^ork — a truly American career. 

Mr. Carpenter was born in Homer, Cortland County, 
New York, Aug. 6, 1830. His father was a respectable 
farmer, of almost as practical a character as King 
George the Second, whose whole doctrine about the 
fine arts was expressed by his saying, in his German 
brogue, " I hate bainting, and hoetry too." Young 



8 THK PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

Carpenter was intended by his good father for a farmer, 
or perhaps a country merchant, and like other country 
boys he was sent to the " deestrick school," or American 
university. 

As soon as the boy was old enough to have any 
preferences, he showed a strong love for Art. This was 
when he was at school, and eight years old, and its 
lirst occasion was his seeing and admiring a clever 
pencil- drawing made on a panel of the school-room 
door, one day at recess, by a schoolmate named Otis, 
subsequently a distinguished physician in New York. 
This door-panel picture stirred up in young Carpenter 
the desire and resolve which made him an artist. For 
the next live or six years the little fellow worked away 
with untiring industry, drawing pictures of all sorts of 
things, on whatever v/ould hold a picture. lie had 
neither instruction, books, nor models. Farmers' sons 
seldom have much money, and the resolute boy often 
traveled three miles to the village to invest his total 
c-apital, usually not over two cents, in a sheet of unruled 
foolscap and a pencil. Blank leaves out of old a^-count 
books, all manner of blank and waste papers, blank 
walls, both inside of the house and out, smooth pieces 
of board — every available surface — were industriously 
used instead of canvas, and some of these monuments 
of youthful effort still decorate the walls of the old 
homestead. As in many other cases, this youthful pe- 
riod was one of ambition as great as its experience was 
small ; the boy soared promptly into the ideal realm 
of historical painting, and among other scenes chalked 
on the side of the old barn the capture of Andre, and 
William Tell Shooting the Apple from his Son's Foad. 



F. B. CAKPENTER. 9 

All this vigorous industry met with little response, 
except snubs and sneers. Mr. Carpenter promptly re- 
buked every hint from his son about becoming a 

painter. And Deacon I , one of the more eminent 

dignitaries of the neighborliood, wlien somebody asked 
him some question about all this drawing, answered, 
with great scorn, " Humph ! you can't turn over a 
chip on liis father's farm without findin' a pictur' 
of a chicken or sunthin' on t'other side on't !" And 
this, by the way, is ail that is known of the eminent and 
influential deacon. 

When young Carpenter was thirteen, his father 
sought to put him in the way of earning a respectable 
living, and secured for him, to this end, employment 
in a grocery store in Ithaca. But drawing molasses 
was not the kind of draAving which the young gentle- 
man preferred, and the worthy man of codfish soon 
became sure that the youth was '' a poor creature." 
For six months he tried faithfully to make the boy do 
something useful, but all in vain ; and quite discour- 
aged, he sent him home to his father with a letter say- 
ing that he showed notliing of the intelligence neces- 
sary for mercantile business, and that his mind turned 
entirely to drawing and reading. Therefore, advised 
the good grocer, the best thing to be done with him is 
to keep him at work on the farm ! This sage advice 
was followed, and doubtless Mr. Carpenter, senior, and 
the other elders, concluded, as Sir Isaac Kewton's 
teacher did about him, that the boy was a hopeless 
dunce. 

Just at this time Mr. George L. Clongh, a young 
artist from Auburn, N. Y., came to Homer to paint 



10 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

some portraits, and young Carpenter, getting permis- 
sion to see him work, watched the operation of paint- 
ing for the first time in his life, and with the keen- 
ness of a famislied man's appetite. Some new ideas 
on the subject of color were thus acquired, and with 
the prompt executive impulse of a natural worker, 
the boy quickly set himself to try them. Colors and 
pencils he had not, and could not buy, and the sugges- 
tion of a neighbor that house j^aint would do nicely to 
begin with, was a welcome one. Away he went to 
the village and got one pound of white lead ; back 
again home, and there he found some lampblack which 
was- used to mark sheep. This served for light and 
shade; and for color, he discovered some lumps of 
Venetian red, which had dried up in a corner of the 
barn until so hard that he had to pound them up on 
the door-step. His pencils were of the sort used by car- 
riage-painters, his pallet was whittled out of a piece 
of shingle, and his canvas a piece of coat lining. Thus 
armed, the youthful artist coaxed his mother to sit, 
and soon outlined and almost completed an easily 
recognized likeness, with what curious grays, reds, and 
browns it is not easy to imagine. But alb parties to 
this great work were afraid of Mr. Carpenter, senior, 
who had grown really angry in opposing the " non- 
sense," as he termed it, of his son ; and so it was kept a 
profound secret. Now Master Frank had become 
rather unpleasantly conspicuous on the farm for being 
always invisible at work-hours ; he was always out of 
the way — " 'round the corner," like Mr. Chevy Slyme 
in the novel. One day the impatient father wanted 
Frank's help, and so, instead of calling him, went right 



F. B. CAKFENTER. 11 

to his room. Striding angrily in, he saw tlic picture, 
and stopped short : 

" Who is that ?" lie asked. 

" Don't you know, father ?" said the boy, roguishly, 
and yet earnestly. 

" It is your mother, I suppose," said the father, 
gruffly, though honestly ; and he was somewhat con- 
science-struck at seeing that the boy who liad not mind 
enough for groceries could actually make a likeness. 
He turned and hastily left the room without a word, 
but his manner- toward his son at once- became much 
more agreeable. Indeed, he even sat to him himself, 
selecting only rainy days, when he could not work, 
and feeling so slight an interest in the matter that he 
fell asleep on one occasion at least, within ten minutes 
after sitting down. Xevertheless,- the likeness was un- 
mistakable, thougjh rous^h ; and the neii^hbors said it 
was decidedly better than the works of the wandering 
artists who had been the only painters there before. A 
small compliment, yet doubtless true. 

At length the sturdy opposition of the father to the 
single ambition of the son gave way, and it was agreed 
that young Carpenter might obtain some regular pro- 
fessional instruction. Promptly and joyfully the boy 
applied to Mr. Sandford Thayer, of Syracuse, who ex- 
amined him closely, received him into his studio, and 
during five months gave him a course of judicious in- 
struction which became a solid foundation for subse- 
quent technical acquirements. Mr. Thayer had been a 
student under the eminent portrait-painter Elliott, who 
visited Syracuse and painted several portraits in Mr. 
Thayer's studio while young Carpenter was there. 



IS THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Mr. Elliott, a genial and thoroughly kind-hearted man, 
took a great interest in the zealous young apprentice, 
allowed him full opportunity of observing his methods, 
gave him advice which was of much service to him, 
and has ever since been his steadfast friend. 

Mr. Carpenter opened a studio for the first time, in 
his native village of Homer, in the year 1846, before 
lie was sixteen. He boarded at home for a few weeks, 
but liis father soon notified him that, having chosen his 
profession, he must live entirely by it ; so lie stoutly 
went into the village and electioneered for board from 
house to house, ofiering to paint portraits in pay for 
his meals. For the first year or two his " chariot- 
wheels drave heavily" enough. His first commission 
was to paint the portrait of a clerk in the village store, 
who paid hhii with .cloth enough for a pair of panta- 
loons; and his second brought him a pair of boots. 
But this success, though not very brilliant, was exceed- 
ingly substantial, and it was real practice, too ; so the 
youth worked on with good courage. His first large 
cash fee was ten dollars. This sum was paid him by 
Hon. IL S. Randall, who lived in the vicinity, for 
drawings to illustrate his well-known book on sheep 
husbandry. Mr. Randall, recognizing the talent of the 
young artist, soon afterward employed him to paint 
his portrait. Shortly afterward, he painted the por- 
traits of the nine survivors of the original Trustees of 
Cortland Academy ; and the pictures, still adorning the 
Academy library, though crude and rough, possess all 
the chief characteristics of the artist's style. In 1848, 
Mr. Carpenter sent to the " American Art Union," then 
a flourishing institution in New York city, an ideal 



F. B. C'AKrKNTKK. 13 

female liead. This was submitted to the purchasing 
committee along with about four hundred other paint- 
ings, and was one of the twelve which they decided to 
buy, out of the whole number; and the struggling 
young countryman received what was to him the really 
handsome sum of fifty dollars. This was a genuine 
artistic and financial success, and was the beginning of 
Mr. Carpenter's career of efficient professional labor 
and prosperity, though he had poverty and difficulty 
yet to encounter. The Art Union afterward bought 
several others of Mr. Carpenter's pictures, being all that 
he offered them ; and he now had a good many com- 
missions for portraits, though at low rates. 

In the spring of 1851 Mr, Carpenter established him- 
self in New York city, sending to the Exhibition of 
the Academy of Design a portrait of a young girl, 
which was liked by many, and so much so by W. S. 
Mount, the painter, that he took pains to become 
acquainted with Mr. Carpenter, sat to him, and did all 
in his power to make him known. In the next autumn 
Mr. Carpenter married Miss Augusta H. Prentiss. 

The following winter he executed a full-length portrait 
of Mr. David Leavitt, which, at the next Exhibition of 
the Academy, was very highly praised, and the artist 
was now chosen Associate of the Academy, at what 
was then an unusually early age. In the autumn of 
1852, Hon. D. A. Bokee, of Brooklyn, commissioned 
Mr. Carpenter to paint a full-length of President Fill- 
more, which was a very successful j^icture, and re- 
ceived an extremely flattering testimonial in a letter 
from the President. The city of New York bought a 
duplicate of this picture. During the first winter of 



14 THE PICTUliE AND THE MEX. 

Gen. Pierce's term, Mr. Carpenter was employed to 
paint his picture, the President consenting only with 
great reluctance, because several j^revious pictures had 
all been unsatisfactory. He, however, quickly found 
himself much interested in the work, and both he and his 
friends considered it beyond comparison the best i^xjr- 
trait ever taken of him. At the urgent request of 
Mr. and Mrs. Pierce, Mr. Carpenter afterward exe- 
cuted successfully the difficult task of painting a pic- 
ture of their deceased son, the materials being only a 
defective daguerreotype, and the recollections of sur- 
viving friends. The genial personal qualities of the 
artist, and his peculiar professional abilities, had by 
this time secured him efficient friends at Washington ; 
and in the beginning of 1855 he went to Washington 
again, commissioned to paint Governor Marcy, and 
Senators Cass, Chase, Houston, and Seward. Congress 
adjourned before the work was completed, but Presi- 
dent Pierce invited the artist to stay at the White 
House for the rest of his visit, and here he executed 
tAVO portraits of Gov. Marcy, one of Attorney-General 
Gushing, and a profile head of the President. 

Among the other portraits painted by Mr. Carpenter 
may be mentioned those of Henry Ward Beecher, liis 
father. Rev. Lyman Beecher, Rev. R. S. Storrs, ex- 
Mayors Talmadge, Brush, Lambert, and Hall of Brook- 
lyn, General McDonald, Professors Gibbs and Aiken, 
General Fremont, Rev. Drs. Cox, Field, Bushnell, and 
Bacon, Captain Hudson of the first telegraph fleet, 
etc., etc. 

Mr. Carpenter is now comfortably established in New 
York city, and is enjoying the reputation and income 



F. B. (JAliPENTEK. 15 

which are the just earnings of so much undiscouraged 
toil and sincere thought and effort. 

Mr. Carpenter is distinctly a portrait-painter, both 
by natural preference and natural endowment. From 
the very first awakening of his inclination for Art, his 
attention was always drawn most keenly to the human 
face and head. These he studies with instinctive 
special love; enjoys their traits and their meaning, and 
labors with his happiest spontaneous thoughts and 
skill to reproduce them on canvas. 

This natural preference, however, would be very im- 
perfect without that fitness for the work which Mr. 
Carpenter's mental and physical constitution affords. 
He has a quick and sensitive intuition of character, 
ready sympathies, a calm and even cheerfulness of dis- 
position, is perfectly unassuming in fact and in manner, 
and is at once kindly, receptive, and appreciative. The 
student of character will easily see that these traits 
constitute the agreeable companion as well as the in- 
telligent painter. This is just the combination calcu- 
lated to render Mr. Carpenter a welcome friend to the 
numerous eminent political leaders whom he has 
painted. They are quick-witted and clear-headed men, 
and have a pretty good judgment on the essential 
merits of a picture ; they spend their lives in contend- 
ing with rivals and opponents ; and they find in the 
artist a painter just and competent without flattery, a 
friend, calm and appreciative and genial, .who wants 
neither influence nor office, and whose easy conver- 
sation and 2:)leasant society make his sitter's chair a 
sort of rest and home. Mr. Fillmore was once asked 
by a lady if his sittings to Mr. Carpenter were not 



16 THK riOTURK AJSD 'IHK MEN. 

tedious ? " O no, madam," he replied, promptly ; " it 
is the pleasantest lioiir in the day." 

Criticisnis already printed have recognized more or 
less clearly the peculiar traits above stated. Thus th(i 
Mome jQur7ial, in 1856, in sj^eaking of ]Mr. Carpenter's 
works in the Exhibition of that year,- observed : " The 
painter of these pictures is perhaps the most variously 
self-adaptable, the most symmetrically constituted, safe, 
and sure, of any of our portrait-painters. If he can be 
characterized by anything, it is the almost unexampled 
number of his variations of color and style, to suit the 
complexion and character of his sitters." And the IST. 
Y. Evening Post subsequently remarked : " The por- 
traits by this artist are remarkable chiefly for their 
subtile mentality ; for their faithful rendering of the 
inward life and dis^^osition." 

Mr. Carpenter's character as a man may be in some 
measure estimated by his career as an artist. He pos- 
sesses ejccellent mental and moral endowments, being 
resolute, industrious, prompt, orderly, and efficient in 
executive matters, and upright and blameless in all the 
relations of a man and a citizen. During the first ten 
months of his residence in ISTcav York he had but one 
or two commissions for portraits; but he did not by 
any means sit idle for that. One of his earliest resolves 
was, to keep at work at something ; and if he had no 
jjaying sitters, he would prevail on friends or acquaint- 
ances to sit, executing their pictures with as much consci- 
entious study and effort as if they had every one been 
Presidents. This was sound business practice as well 
as sound Art practice, because his skill increased just as 
much as if his time were full ; and when the next com- 



F. B. CAliPENTKK. 



17 



mission did come, lie w.as sure to paint better than 
ever before. Xor has he grown idle yet. The true 
ideal of the artist's industry is exactly, in Art, what the 
Christian's contest is in life : to labor all his life toward 
a perfection which he is bound to work for just as hard 
as if he could reach it. The eminent English painter 
Mulready became, in 1817, one of the instructors or 
''visitors" in the "life school," or place for learning 
how to draw the human figure. In 1863, after holding 
this position for forty-six years, the old man declared — 
" I have, from the first moment I became a visitor in 
the life school, drawn there as if Iicere drawing for a 
prize?"* He was, too ; but it was a higher prize than 
any Academy could give. Sir Charles Eastlake said 
that Mr. Mulready was " the best and most judicious 
teacher the Royal Academy ever had;" and Charles 
Landseer said, " Perhaps neither is there now, nor at 
any time has there been, so great a draughtsman as Mr. 
Mulready." Mr. Carpenter is not yet the first painter 
in the world, but then he is not so old as Mulready, 
who was born in 1786. But his industry is as thorough 
in principle as that of the veteran painter ; it was only 
the other day that he showed a friend " Chapman's 
American Drawing Book," which he had under his 
arm, stating that he had purchased it with the inten- 
tion of studying it thoroughly. 

Mr. Carpenter's views of the ethics of Art, as well as 
his moral and religious sentiments generally, have 
always been ideally high. In youth, he conceived that 
the artist ought of necessity to be of the purest char- 
acter, and with boyish enthusiasm he resolved to en- 
deavor to realize in himself in some measure the union 
', 2 



18 • THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

of artistic ability and moral excellence. The endeavor 
has consistently been made. The very endeavor enno- 
bles. It is the seeker himself after such high endow- 
ments who most dee]3ly feels the weakness of hmnan 
eiforts after goodness. But the high position and the 
spotless name which Mr. Carpenter has gained are 
most fully believed his just due by those wlio know 
him best. 

He is a man of wide intelligence and eorlsiderable 
literary ability and attainment outside of his profes- 
sion, and his book, " Six Months at the White House," 
giving the history of his stay there while at work on 
his great picture, is a singularly interesting one. Mr. 
Carpenter is of middle height, rather slender, with del- 
licate features, abundant straight black hair, and dark 
gray eyes. His voice is rather low and of agreeable 
tone ; and in manner he is extremely quiet, meditative, 
and often apparently quite absorbed in reflection or 
reveiy, seeming to receive impressions from persons and 
things around him unconsciously, rather than by keeping 
his intellect at work to seize them ; in short, he is a 
gentleman, and those who know him best love him most. 



THE OCCASION. 19 



11. 

THE OCCASION. 

The Emancipation of the Slaves in the United States 
belongs to a class of events so lofty and so vast in 
nature and meaning, that it is an elfort to comprehend 
them. It has often been said that no single deed so 
great has been done on earth since Christ was crucified. 
If any can be compared with it, they are the very 
greatest : the Christianizing of the Roman Empire by 
Constantine ; the issue of Magna Charta to England ; 
the inauguration of the Reformation by Luther ; the 
Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it would be 
easy to show that it is linked with these in one chain 
of cause and effect. The last three of the series are ob- 
viously so related. The Declaration of Indej)endencc 
was the logical result of the j^rinciples of Luther put 
in practice by English Puritans, and announced in their 
political applications by the descendants and successors 
of those Puritans, the Continental Congress. Emanci- 
pation has made the United States the banner-bearer 
of mankind — the foremost nation in human progress — 
just as the Declaration did in 1776. 

The train of circumstances that preceded President 
Lincoln's Proclamation of September 22, 1862, is, of 
course, of great historical interest and importance. 
The Constitution of the United States was in its very 
framing put together with compromises about Slavery. 



20 THE PICTUKK AND THE MEN. 

The first jieriod of tlie liistory of this subject comes 
down to about the end of the last century. During 
that period there was mucli opposition to slaveholding, 
by men of high moral nature and profound political 
insight, all over the country, and since business interest 
coincided with the moral duty of the case, there was 
decidedly a tendency toward a gradual dying out of 
the system. 

The second period begins with that great increase 
in the production of cotton which resulted from the 
invention and use of Whitney's cotton-gin, dating from 
about 1793. This increase caused slaves to grow raj>- 
idly more valuable, and it is a matter of course that 
men desire to think, and therefore tend strongly to 
think, that what is very profitable must be right, or at 
least excusable. 

The third period may be reckoned from the begin- 
ning of the abolition movement of Mr. Garrison and his 
associates down to the date of the Proclamation, in 
Avhich it culminated. The first period was that of 
feeble moral reprobation of slavery ; the second, that 
of increasing financial acquiescence in slavery; the 
third, that of earnest moral attack and defense of slav- 
ery, the financial and political aspects of it not being 
now the really predominant ones. 

In this third period came the successive excitements 
of the Missouri Compromise, the " incendiary docu- 
ment" and " gag-law" time, the " Political Abolition" 
time, the " Free Soil" time, the " Kansas" time, the 
" John Brown" time, and lastly the rebellion. 

The rebellion was the effort of the slave interest to 
take a snap judgment, so to speak, on a question which 



THE OCCASION. 21 

the countr}^ was evidently iji a steady advance toward 
decidinoj on the side of freedom. And so much orijani- 
zation and preparation had the South, so utterly igno- 
rant of the scheme was the IsTorth, so strong was the 
combination of a united South, Northern sympathizers, 
and European monarchies, and so undecided and dor- 
mant were the convictions of very many even of the 
loyal Northern men, that undoubtedly the nation had 
a narrow escape from destruction, winning in the con- 
flict not merely nor even chiefly as the richest and 
strongest of the two warring powers, but by means of 
the strength of the patriotism and moral convictions 
that germinated and grew vigorously and fast by the 
stimulus of the very Are that was kindled to consume 
tliem. 

The words in which Mr. Lincoln described the occa- 
sion on which the Proclamation was planned and issued 
have all his striking and characteristic plainness, sim- 
plicity, directness, and graphic force. He said to Mr. 
Carpenter, " Things had gone on from bad to worse, 
until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on 
the plan of operations we had been pursuing ; that we 
had about played our last card, and must change our 
tactics, or lose the game." 

This time was the latter part of the summer of 1862, 
the period of the discouragement j^roduced by the 
" Peninsular campaign." It is true that Union suc- 
cesses had taken place at several points upon the outer 
circumference of the rebellion ; but its main body yet 
remained substantially untouched, and above all, its 
mailed head — consisting of the main army under Lee, 
protected by the strong and extremely defensible coun- 



22 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

try of Northern Virginia — that mailed head which it 
constantly thrust out at Washington and tlie North, 
was still full of threatening and dangerous life. Al- 
though the Government had in the field in the begin- 
ning of that year more than 660,000 soldiers, and a navy 
of 246 ships, 22,000 men, and 1,892 guns, no decisive 
injury had yet been done to the enemy. Political 
opponents at home were raising an awful clamor about 
the inefficiency and incapacity of the Administration, 
and a good many even of its friends were joining in 
the cry. There was a very visible and growing w^eari- 
ness among the people, of conscriptions, of taxes, of 
the disordered currency, of the increasing prices of all 
sorts of manufactured and imported commodities. Mr. 
Greeley even goes so far as to say that it is doubtful 
whether a popular vote on giving up the fight, if taken 
during the year next after the issue of the Proclama- 
tion, would not have been affirmative. This opinion, 
however, is probably shaded by its author's well-known 
liability to look on the dark side, for the patriotism 
of Mr. Greeley can not be doubted. 

However, Mr. Blair urged to Mr. Lincoln as a reason 
against the Proclamation, that its issue would cause 
th3 loss of the fall elections ; and, sure enough, it appa- 
rently did. In ten States which gave Mr. Lincoln in 
1860 more than 208,000 majority, the Administration 
candidates for State offices were beaten in the fall of 
1862 by nearly 36,000. This, however, was rather the 
result of the hesitating non-emancipation policy of the 
previous two years, and its attendant ill success, than the 
result of the new emancipation policy, only just an- 
nounced, and not yet proved as an influence, in the war.. 



THE OCCASION-.- 23 

It was the result of the old mistakes, not of the new 
correction. As soon as the new policy was well under- 
stood, and began to show its operation, there was n6 
more fear of losing elections by it. It became the policy 
of the nation, and ceased to be a party question, just as 
the support of the Government had ceased to be a party 
question ever since Sumter was attacked. 

Assuredly, the people of the United States waited 
long enough before resolving upon universal freedom. 
Most undoubtedly the Proclamation was made at the 
right time to take the great mass of the nation with it. 
Any time would have been too late for extremists on 
one side, and too early for extremists on the other. 
But the deeds of Mr. Lincoln were the resolutions of 
the loyal people as a whole, and his course was with a 
sort of magnetic truth what they felt to be best. 

It was therefore really the people who did the acts 
"which the President superintended, as their chief 
manager. Even after the war broke out, it took nearly 
two years to bring the people into the conviction that 
emancipation must come — that this vast moral justice 
was absolutely indispensable, alike to free the North 
from its false position and to put the South in its true 
one — to unite and strengthen the right side and to 
cripple the wrong. Accordingly, the war had com- 
menced with the most circumspect and sj'-stematic 
observance of " conservative" precedent in this matter, 
and went on for a long time in a manner which, so far 
as slavery was concerned, " could not offend the feel- 
ings of the most fastidious" slaveholder. So cautious 
and conservative a statesman as Edward Everett as- 
serted that it was matter of grave doubt " whether 



24: THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

any act of the Government of the United States was 
necessary to liberate the slaves in a State which is in 
open rebellion." Prophetic minds felt from the very 
first gun that the day of universal freedom was at 
hand. But prophetic minds are few ; national convic- 
tions and sentiments change very gradually ; and 
before emancipation could be safely made the law, an 
underpinning of public opinion had to "he slowly laid 
for it, even though thousands of millions of dollars 
were expended in the building, and though the struc- 
ture was cemented and soaked in the blood of our 
bravest men. In the United States, no law will ope- 
rate which public opinion does not support. This is 
true, no matter whether such law be right or wrong. 
It is a fundamental fact in democracies. It has been 
proved over and over in laws on the liquor question, 
and perhaps an understanding of this may have influ- 
enced the President's delay in the matter. However 
that may be, Mr. Lincoln, while personally profoundly 
anxious for universal freedom, was utterly immovable 
in the resolution to maintain the national existence 
within undoubted constitutional forms if possible — and 
persisted in this course, until, as he said, its last card 
had been played. This is most strongly shown in his 
letter to Mr. Greeley of Aug. 22, 1862, a remarkably 
terse and forcible statement in every possible variation 
of assertion, of this object. " My paramount object," he 
said, " is to save the Union, and not either to save or 
to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without 
freeing any slaves, I would do it — if I could save it by 
freeing all the slaves, I would do it — and if I could do 
it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also 



THE OCCASION. 25 

do that^" Mr. Seward took it for granted that tlie war 
would not touch the slavery question at all. In his 
dispatch to Minister Dayton, of April 22d, 1861, he 
said, with mistaken prediction, " The condition of slav- 
ery in the several States will remain just the same, 
whether it (the rebellion) succeed or fail." The inani- 
festo of Gen. McDowell on his fii'st entry into Vir- 
ginia, in July, 18G1, contained nothing that showed 
whether or not such a thing as slavery existed. Mc- 
Clellan's proclamation in West Virginia of May 26, 
3 861, had before announced that he would "subdue 
slave insurrection with an iron hand." Gen. T. "VV. 
Sherman, after the victory at Port Royal, expressly dis- 
claimed any intention of meddling with slavery. Gen. 
Dix, in occupying the Eastern Shore counties of Vir- 
ginia, did the like, and shut his lines to fugitives from 
slavery ; Gen. Halleck, on succeeding Fremont in Mis- 
souri, did the like, and, moreover, expelled from the 
protection of his lines such fugitives as had already 
taken refuge there. Gen. Burnside published a similar 
disclaimer on occupying Roanoke Island; Gen. Buell 
in Tennessee and Kentucky, Gen. Hooker on tho upper 
Potomac, Gen. Williams in Louisiana, did the like, and 
still further, they opened their camps to slave-catchers, 
and officially helped them, by ordering the surrender 
of fugitives, and even by furnishing detachments or 
details to assist in the chase. Fremont's proclamation 
of freedom in Missouri was at once modified within 
the statutory limits ; Hunter's in South Carolina was 
promptly annulled ; Phelps' at Ship Island would have 
been, had not circumstances rendered it unnecessary. 
Kever since the creation of the world was there seen 



26^ Tllli; PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

any Avar before, conducted by the j^ear together, on the 
avowed principle and in the diligent and effective prac- 
tice of not touching tlie greatest source of the enemy's 
strengtli, of assuring him the full enjoyment of it, of 
carefully returning to him any of it that got away, and 
of helping him cliase it right through the very ranks of 
the extra-magnanimous belligerents. It was exerting our 
whole force to protect the enemy's powder-magazine. 

Even Vv'hen the course of events gradually forced the 
nation from this strange method of making war by 
guaranteeing the enemy, the change was made very 
slowly and gradually. Officers commanding in one 
and another locality found it a physical impossibility 
to dispense with the services of the negroes, and a 
moral impossibility to treat them otherwise than as 
men and freemen. Such cases multiplied in number 
and grew in importance for months and months, and a 
series of partial measures, dealing with slavery in the 
District of Columbia, or with slaves as contraband of 
war, or as subject to confiscation, or as fit material for 
enlistment, had successively tested the public sentiment 
of the country for a long time before the cautious 
President could determine that the hour was come for 
proclaiming "liberty throughout all the land." At 
last, however, it was time. With . true instinct, the 
man of the 2>eople felt that the will of the j^eople was 
ripe for the new policy. The furious battles of South 
Mountain and Antietam, and the subsequent retreat of 
Lee, beaten and driven over the Potomac from his first 
invasion of Maryland, constituted a turn in the tide of 
affairs which enabled the Proclamation to appear in 
victory instead of defeat. 



THE OCCASION. 27 

As prompt at snatching an occasion as he was slow 
in matui'ing the purpose to be served, Mr. Lincoln in- 
stantly published the grandest utterance of the age. 
It Avas not, it is true, an unconditional assertion either of 
the rights of man, or of the freedom of any class of men. 
In fact, as it was worded, it gave the rebels an oppor-"' 
tunity of retaining the system of slavery in every 
Southern State ; for it was not in itself a gift of eman- 
cipation, but only contingent notice of emancipation at 
one hundred days. mr. Lincoln had no Avisli to seem 
to do a great action himself, nor to put forth any im- 
pressive phrases. It is a feature most characteristic 
of his simple, weighty, honest, unconscious, straight- 
forward nature, that in this great state paper, announc- 
ing a radical change in the social and political policy 
of the strongest nation in the world, relieving the fore- 
most people on earth from a social blot and- blunder 
which Avould have disgraced and hampered the hind- 
most, admitting four millions of chattels personal into 
the brotherhood of man, and completing for the first 
time the exemplification of Christian morals in the 
legal action of a democracy — that in doing all this, he 
so did it as to seem not to do it ; as to allow it to hap- 
pen, not at once, by the force of an actual fiat, but after 
three months, in the form of the obligatory fulfillment 
of a past promise ; and even then, not by any act of 
his, or even of the nation, but simply by the neglect of 
the persons addressed to perform the plainest duties of 
the citizen. For the reader of the Proclamation will 
see at once how entirely it throws the responsibility 
of the act upon the South. If the Southern States had 
discontinued their rebellious oriranization and resumed 



28 THE nCTURE AND THE MEN. 

their places in Congress within the hundred days, the 
nation would have been bound to accept such action 
and appearance as a reparation in full, and to have 
suffered the whole fabric of slavery to remain as before, 
not merely upheld by the laws of each State and the 
entire frame of Southern society, but, as before the 
war, by the acquiescence and moral support of the 
whole United States. Doubtless, Mr. Lincoln may 
liave felt that there was in fact no danger of such sub- 
mission and return ; but the absolute disinterestedness, 
profound caution, sagacious foreseeing statesmanship, 
and lawyer-like clearness, accuracy, and safety of the 
drafting of the paper are none the less wonderful for 
that. The Proclamation does not say one word nor do 
one thing not absolutely necessary ; it neither discusses 
a principle, nor argues a case, nor expresses a feeling. 
It does not e^-en put forth its real and vast significance 
directly ; much less with ornaments of speech or large- 
ness of words. It is the barest, briefest notice to legal 
delinquents to return to duty, with a proviso of further 
action if they do not return. It is so arranged, that if 
there be a chance not to secure emancipation, the 
chance shall be taken ; that if the crowning glory of 
the century can be avoided, it shall be avoided ; that 
if the signer can escape the credit of freeing four mil- 
lions of slaves, he shall escape it ; that if the South can 
be induced to retain their labor system, they shall re- 
tain it ; that if the actual responsibility of freedom is to 
rest anywhere, it shall rest upon the rebel slaveholders 
themselves. It embodies the utter abnegation of per- 
scmal merit or emotion ; the entire avoidance of conti'o- 
versy upon either any principle in doctrine or any 



THE OCCASION. 29 

ma torial interest or association of human beings ; it is 
the simple, plain statement of one future fact, miless 
there shall happen another future fact. And notwith- 
standing all this guarded negation of statement and 
conditional assertion, yet such Avere the aspects of the 
war in the field, and of the public opinion of the North, 
that these two gigantic forces, embodying the moral 
sum total of the United States for the time beimr, in- 
spired into the words of this plain short paper that 
whole and complete and immense meaning which has 
rendered it immortal. 



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32 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 



III. 

THE PICTURE. 

TuE original conception of Mr. Carpenter's great 
picture is due to liis profound loyalty to the United 
States, his fervent devotion to Freedom, his deep exul- 
tation when the issue of the Great Proclamation an- 
nounced that Slavery was Abolished, his strong desire 
to execute some work within the field of his ait which 
should express his appreciation of the questions of the 
war, and the nation's action upon them, and his hon- 
orable ambition to associate his own name and reputa- 
tion with an occasion so glorious. The artist thus de- 
scribes his own first clear conception of the time and 
sentiment of his picture, in his " Six Months at the 
"White House :" 

" The long-prayed-for year of jubilee had come ; the 
bonds of the oppressed were loosed ; the prison doors 
were opened. ' Behold,' said a voice, ' how a man 
may be exalted to a dignity and glory almost divine, 
and give freedom to a race ! Surely Ait should unite 
with Eloquence and Poetry to celebrate such a theme.' 
I conceived of that band of men upon whom the eyes 
of the.world centred as never before upon ministers of 
state, gathered in council, depressed, perhaps disheart- 
ened at the vain efforts of many months to restore the 
supremacy of the Government. I saw, in thoughl, the 
head of the nation, bowed down with his weight of 



THE nCTURE. 33 

care and responsibility, solemnly announcing, as he un- 
folded the prepared draft of the Proclamation, that the 
time for the inauguration of this policy had arrived ; I 
endeavored to imagine the conflicting emotions of satis- 
faction, doubl, and distrust with which such an an- 
nouncement would be received by men of the varied 
characteristics of the assembled councilors." 

This was in the end of the year 1863, the first day of 
which had witnessed the issuing of the Supplemen- 
tary Proclamation announcing the fulfillment of the 
promise. For some weeks the painter, after his man- 
ner, brooded silently over his design. Gradualiy 
the group assumed in his imagination such a form and 
arrangement as satisfied his conception of what the 
assembly must have been. Mr. Carpenter is not v/ith, 
out a decided tendency toward those lofty realms of 
human aspiration and emotional thought, the mystical 
and the supernatural ; and he records a coincidence in 
the matter of adjusting his design which is sufl[iciently 
striking. "In seeking a point of unity or action for 
the picture," he says, " I was impressed with the con- 
viction that important modifications followed the read- 
ing of the Proclamation at the suggestion of the Secre- 
tary of State, and I determined upon such an incident 
as the moment of time to be represented. I was sub- 
sequently surprised and gratified when Mr. Lincoln 
himself, reciting the history of the Proclamation to me, 
dwelt particularly upon the fact, that not only was the 
time of its issue decided by Secretary Seward's advice, 
but that one of the most important words in the docu- 
ment was added through his strenuous representa- 
tions." 



34 THE PICTURE AND THE JIEN. 

The design thus determined, it remainecl to execute 
it, and Mr. Carpenter first consulted Mr. Samuel Sin- 
clair, now publisher of the N. Y. Tribune, upon the 
means of interesting in the scheme Messrs. Schuyler 
Colfax and Owen Lovejoy, who should, in their turn, 
influence their personal and political friend the Presi. 
dent. This shrewd little piece of wire-pulling succeed- 
ed, for Mr. Sinclair, being the very next week in Wash- 
ington, went with Mr. Colfax to Mr. Lincoln, explained 
the plan, and without much difliculty obtained his assent. 

The road was now clear for the execution of the am- 
bitious scheme of the artist ; but how was he to travel 
in it ? " Who goeth a warfare any time at his own 
charges ?" — and besides, he had not the means for such 
unscriptural expenditure, even were he so anti-biblical 
as to make it. A second coincidence attended the 
solution of the difficulty. He left home one morning, 
pondering deeply upon the financial lion in his path ; 
and contriving and rejecting, Avith increasing discour- 
agement, one expedient after another, he reached the 
door of the building where his studio was established, 
and was about to enter. At that moment he happened 
to observe a gentleman who was intently examining 
some pictures in a shop window. Something familiar 
in the air of the figure attracted the artist, and when 
in a few moments the gazer turned round, it proved to 
be Frederick A. Lane, Esq., an old acquaintance who, 
five years before, had lived near Mr. Carpenter in 
Brooklyn, and, like him, had at that time been strug- 
gling hard for a living, though in the dry path of law, 
instead of the supposed more flowery ways of Art. 

Mr. Carpenter asked Mr. Lane up into his studio, 



THE nCTUKE. 35 

and there was some comparing of old reminiscences 
and late experiences. The laAvyer had prospered in 
business and in purse ; the artist was still poor. Sud- 
denly the sensitive painter was stirred with the thought 
that this meeting was " providential." A less sponta- 
neous man would have reckoned this a mere conceit, 
and would have reasoned away from it. But the men- 
tal constitution of an artist has often much of the same 
quickness of intuition and instinctive reliance ujjon it, 
which is usually attributed to women. Mr. Carpen- 
ter at once briefly laid before his visitor his whole 
sclieme. Mr. Lane quietly heard him through. " Are 
you sure of Mr. Lincoln's consent and co-operation ?" 
he asked. The painter told him of the promise which 
Messrs. Sinclair and Colfax had received. " Then," said 
this liberal friend, " you shall paint the picture. Take 
plenty of time. Make it the great work of your life ; 
and draw upon me for whatever funds you will require 
to the end." 

On the 4th of February, 1864, Mr. Carpenter went 
to. Washington, and calling next day upon Hon. Owen 
Lovejoy, obtained a note of introduction to Mr. Lincoln. 
After waiting in vain for two days for an opportunity 
to present it, the artist at last went up to the White 
House on the afternoon of Saturday, and taking his 
place in what the French call the " tail" of citizens who 
were filing past the patient President, each shaking 
hands and uttering some observation as they went, 
like so many customers popping their letters into some 
crowded post-office window, he took his turn, and was 
named to Mr. Lincoln. After a moment's recollection, 
Mr. Lincoln said, "O yes, I know — this is the painter;" 



36 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

and standing up as tall as lie could — which was much 
— he added, with a queer look, "Jo you think, Mr. 
Carpenter, that you can make a handsome picture of 
me /"' The painter was taken aback at this very direct 
query, and too polite to say No, and too honest to say 
Yes, he answered at random, coming, however, enough 
to the point to ask if he could have a private interview 
after the reception. " I reckon !" was the reply of the 
Executive, as he went gravely on again with his pump- 
handling. 

When this tiresome ceremony was over, the painter 
was admitted to the President's office, where Mr. Lin- 
coln was already hard at work signing acts of Con- 
gress. He gave his visitor a seat, and received and read 
Mr. Lovejoy's note of introduction. Then, taking off his 
spectacles, he turned to the artist and said, in his char- 
acteristic way, " Well, Mr. Carpenter, we will turn yoit 
in loose here" — as if the painter were a harmless sort 
of beast, safe in pasture without " poke" or " hobbling" 
— " and try to give you a good chance to work out 
your idea." It is curious to consider how many of the 
rulers of the earth would have thus assented to an 
artist's proposal for a great historical picture of one of 
the turning-points in human progress, in a sentence of 
twenty-one words (not counting the name of the per- 
son spoken to), all monosyllables but one, and express- 
ing their thought with a metaphor accurate, forcible, 
£fnd taken from the pasture and the oxen. 

The enthusiastic artist began to express as well as 
he could, one or another lofty idea of his intended 
work. The President paid little attention to this, but 
after his fashion went straight to the root of the matter 



THE riCTTJEE. 37 

and proceeded to give his auditor a history of the cir- 
cumstances. "VYe transcribe Mr. Lincoln's own words 
as given by Mr. Carpenter.* 

"It had got to be midsummer, 1862. Things had 
gone on from bad to woi-se, until I felt that we had 
reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations 
we had been pursuing; that we had about played our 
last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the 
game. I now determined upon the adoption of the 
emancipation policy; and without consultation w^ith 
or the knowledge of the Cabinet, I prepared the origi- 
nal draft of the proclamation, and, after much anxious 
tliought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the subject. 
This was the last of July, or the first part of August, 
1862, This Cabinet meeting took place upon a Satur- 
day. All were present, excepting Mr. Blair, the post- 
master-general, who was absent at the opening of the 
discussion, but came in subsequently. I said to the 
Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had 
not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay 
the subject-matter of a proclamation before them ; sug- 
gestions as to which would be in order after they had 
heard it read. Mr. Lovejoy was in error when he in- 
formed you [viz., Mr. Carpenter, at a previous time] 
that it excited no comment, excepting on the part of 
Secretary Seward. Various suggestions were offered. 
Secretary Chase wished the language stronger in refer- 
ence to the arming of the blacks ; Mr. Blair, after he 
came in, deprecated the policy on the ground that it 

would cost the Administration the fall elections. 
t 

* Six Months at the White House, pp. 20, 21, 22. 



6b THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Nothing, however, was offered that I had not fully 
anticipated and settled in my own mind, until Secretary 
Seward spoke. He said in substance : ' Mr. President, 
I approve of the proclamation, but I question the expe- 
diency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of 
the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, 
is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step. 
It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted 
government ; a cry for help ; the government stretch- 
ing forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia 
stretching forth her hands to the Government.' His 
idea was, that it would be considered our last shriek on 
the retreat. 'Now,' continued Mr. Seward, 'while I 
approve the measure, I suggest, sir, that you postpone 
its issue until you can give it to the country supported 
by military success, instead of issuing it, as would be 
the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the war.' 
The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State 
struck me with very great force. It was an aspect of 
the case that, in all my thought upon the subject, I 
had entirely overlooked. The result was that I put 
the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a 
picture, waiting for a victory. From time to time I 
added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, 
anxiously watching the progress of events. Well, the 
next news we had was of Pope's disaster at Bull Rnn. 
Things looked darker than ever. Finally came the 
week of the battle of Antietam. I determined to wait 
no longer. The news came, I think, on Wednesday, 
that the advantage Avas on our side. I was then stay- 
ing at the Soldiers' Home. Here I finished writing the 
second draft of the preliminary proclamation; came up 



THE PICTURE. 39 

on Saturday; called the Cabinet together to hear it, 
and it was published the following Monday." 

At the final meeting of September 20th, another in- 
teresting incident occurred in connection with Secretary 
Seward. The President had Avritten the important part 
of the proclamation in these words : 

" That, on the first day of January, in the year of our 
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all 
persons held as slaves within any State or designated 
part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in 
rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thence- 
forward, and forever free ; and the Executive Govern- 
ment of the United States, including the military and 
naval authority tJiereof, will recognize the freedom of 
such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such 
persons, or any of them, in any eiForts they may make 
for their actual ft-eedom." " When I finished reading 
this paragraph," resumed Mr. Lincoln, " Mr. Seward 
stopped me, and said, ^ I think, ]Mi'. President, that you 
should insert after the w^ord " reco^nz^^," in that sen- 
tence, the words " and maintain.'''' ' " I replied that I 
had already fully considered the import of that expres- 
sion in this connection, but I had not introduced it, be- 
cause it was not my way to promise what I was not 
entirely sure that I could perform, and I was not pre- 
pared to say that I thought we were exactly able to 
* maintain' this." 

" But," said he, *' Seward insisted that we ought to 
take this ground ; and the words finally went in !" 

Mr. Lincoln, having finished this account, explained 
in detafl how the Cabinet and he were grouped at 
that meeting ; and when the artist sliowed the Prcsi- 



40 THE PICTUKE AND .THE MEN. 

dent a pencil sketch of the i)icture as he had already- 
planned it, it was found altogether in accordance with 
the facts, except that the whole composition had to be 
turned end for end, in order to put Mr. Lincoln at the 
right place, by the table. 

The remaining necessary details of sketching were 
now promptly completed ; the painter's easel was set 
up in the library, but shortly removed to the state 
dining-room, where the work was finished. The painter 
was in- good earnest " turned in loose," for he was, 
during the succeeding six months, on terms almost as 
intimate with Mr. Lincoln as were the President's own 
private secretaries. He went and came at pleasure, 
sat in Mr. Lincoln's private office while confidential 
business was transacting, and when any one looked 
suspiciously toward him, the President would say, 
" Oh, you needn't mind him — he is a painter." From 
time to time the President and the members of the 
Cabinet gave sittings for their respective portraits, 
chatting easily and freely with the companionable 
artist on all manner of topics, and exchanging all sorts 
of • reminiscences, stories, reasonings, and opinions. 
Frequently visitors at the White House came to ob- 
serve the progress of the great picture ; at other times 
friends of the artist, sometimes brought in by Mr. 
Lincoln. 

The industry of the artist was unfailing and ardent. 
His relaxation even was part of his work, for it con- 
sisted almost entirely of cultivating a more perfect 
acquaintance with the men whom he was to paint. All 
day he worked at his designing, sketching, or paint- 
ing, and all day .was not enough. When night fell, he 



THE ricrrKE. 41 

lighted u]) the great chandelier of the room, and often 
labored straight onward, unconscious of the passage of 
time, until the morning light found him still brush in 
hand before the immense canvas, and drove him away 
by spoiling the tone of the gas-light. 

At the end of a half year the work was complet- 
ed, and the President and Cabinet, at the close of a 
business session, adjourned to the temporary studio, 
to hold a formal critical session upon the great pic- 
ture. Sitting in the midst of his chief assistants, Mr. 
Lincoln pronounced what he called his " unschooled" 
opinion of the work, in words which Mr. Carpenter 
has not put on record, but which, he says, " could not 
but have afforded the deepest gratification to any 
artist." For two days before being removed, the 
picture was now exhibited freely to the public, in the 
East Room, several thousands of persons crowding in 
to see it on each day. On the last afternoon, the Presi- 
dent and the painter went together to have a last look 
at the work before it was rolled up for removal. Mr. 
Lincoln sat down before the picture and gazed silently 
at it. Mr. Carpenter remarked that he had worked oxit 
his idea, and asked for Mr. Lincoln's final suggestions 
and criticism. " There is little to find fault with," was 
the reply ; " the portraiture is the main thing, and that 
seems to me absolutely perfect." They discussed the 
various accessories : the war maps, the portfolios, the 
map showing the distribution of slaves in the South, 
the book leaning against the leg of the chair, which 
was painted as if bound in " law calf." The title placed 
upon this was that of a work which Mr. Lincoln had 
used in preparing his proclamation — Whiting's " War 

■ 



4:2 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Powers of the President," — and this not "being a law 
book, the President requested that the coloring of the 
cover be changed accordingly. " Is there anything 
else that you would like changed or added ?" asked 
the painter. " No," was the reply, and the President 
continued, repeating the very expression Avhicli he had 
used on examining the first sketch, " It is as good as it 
can be made." 

The painter took the opportunity to describe the 
enthusiastic feelings with which he had first thought of 
the picture, and in which he had labored upon it, and 
to thank Mr. Lincoln for his constant kindness in all 
their intercourse. Mr. Carpenter adds, " He listened 
l^ensively — almost j^assively, to me — his eyes fastened 
upon the picture. As I finished, he turned, and in his 
simple-hearted, earnest way said, * Carpenter, I believe 
I am about as glad over the success of this work as you 
are.' And with these words in my ear, and a cordial 
' good-bye' grasp of the hand, President and painter 
separated." 

A single incident in the subsequent history of the 
picture may be mentioned here, which has the interest 
that always attaches to premonitions and signs, and 
illustrates Mr. Lincoln's personal popularity. Mr. 
Carpenter's picture was exhibited in the Rotunda of 
the Capitol during a few days just before Mr. Lincoln's 
second inauguration, and while it was being secured in 
its j^lace, a number of persons were looking at it, among 
whom w^as a policeman of the Capitol squad. All at 
once a stray sunbeam glanced through the dome and 
settled full upon the face of the portrait of Mr. Lincoln, 
the rest of the picture remaining in sliadow. It was a 



THE PICTURE. 43 

stailliiig effect. The policeman pointed to it, exclaim- 
ing, " Look ! that is as it should be, God bless him ! 
may the sun shine on his head forever !" 

Mr. Carpenter's great picture, of whose conception 
and execution the foregoing is a brief account, repre- 
sents the Cabinet of Mr. Lincoln grouped around their 
chief as they stood or sat when he read the Proclama- 
tion to them. It shows their ordinary costume and 
their manner of carrying themselves ; and the table, the 
chairs, the room and all its fittings and furniture of 
every kind, are represented without ornament or addi- 
tion, exactly as they were at the time. The artist's 
friends frequently told him that his picture w^ould look 
barren and commonplace unless he put in some urns, 
pillars, curtains, tassels, velvet table-cloths, American 
eagles, banners of our country, geniuses of liberty, or 
other unmeaning symbols not there ; but he as often re- 
plied, with great good sense and correct feeling, that he 
would rather fail, while on the side of truth, by painting 
the scene as it actually was, than to succeed by doing 
what would be actual falsehood. He justly felt that 
he had no more right to vary from the facts in the case, 
than a rebel historian would have to assert that Mr. 
Lincoln assassinated J. Wilkes Booth. The interest of 
the scene, the truthfulness of its representation — these 
were the only means which he chose to use for produc- 
ing an impression, and in thus choosing he was true to 
his own principles and to those of real Art. " Art," to 
use Mr. Carpenter's own words, " should aim to em- 
body and express the spirit and best thought of its own 
age." To this end, when men and their actions are 
painted, the men should be delineated, clothed, placed. 



44 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

and circumstanced as they actually were ; not as the 
painter may fancy it most impressive to imagine them. 
Greenough's statue of Wasliington, in the Capitol 
grounds, which Attorney-General Bates called " a very 
good representation of Jupiter Tonans," is a terrible 
instance of the opposite of Mr. Carpenter's idea. This 
statue represents the Father of his Country seated in 
the open air, and clothed in a sheet swathed round him 
so as to leave him naked, or nearly so, from about the 
waist upward — a costume in which General Washing- 
ton never appeared in public. To put our first Presi- 
dent into a garb which' was an imaginary one eighteen 
hundred years ago, is exactly such a blunder, only the 
other end foremost, as that which a Dutch painter com- 
mitted in painting Abraham on Mount Moriah, draw- 
ing a fine bead on Isaac with a horse-pistol, for the 
purpose of sacrificing him. Mr. C/arpenter had too 
much sense and tact to fall into any such errors of time, 
or errors of association either ; and the very simplicity 
and plainness of the furniture and fittings in his picture 
constitute an important part of its value, because they 
are an important part of its truth. A century from 
this time it will be very interesting to know that thus 
these men were dressed, and thus was their council 
held, and their council-room furnished. But a fluted 
pillar, a red curtain, an immense vase, could have in 
such a place no meaning, purpose, or interest what- 
ever, except to show the shallowness, ignorance, and 
conventionality of the artist. 

The arrangement of the persons in this picture was 
such as to throw them into two groups, which may be 
called radical and conservative, the former composed of 



THE riCTUEE. 45 

Messrs. Cliasc and Stanton ; the latter of Messrs. Sew- 
ard, AVelles, Bates, Blair, and Smith. Mr. Lincoln sits 
between them, as if in the place of a point of union, 
but still nearest to the radicals. The positions of the 
individual men are further symbolical. Secretary 
Stanton, representing the military force of the Govern- 
ment, is at the President's right hand, in the foreground, 
and Secretary Chase, in behalf of the public j)urse, 
stands by his side. Secretary AYelles, of the Navy, is 
at his left, and a little in the background, the navy 
being secondary to the army in importance in the 
struggle. And Secretary Seward, holding what is often 
called the premiership or prime-ministership, and by 
etiquette having precedence of the rest of the Cabinet, 
is accordingly placed in the center foreground. With 
hand partly spread and forefinger extended, Mr. 
Seward emphasizes his approval of the Proclamation 
to which he has just listened, but suggests that it " be 
postponed until it can be supported by military suc- 
cess." At the opposite or left-hand end of the table 
Attorney-General Bates, his arms folded, is thinking 
steadily upon the new questions of constitutional law 
which this Proclamation will call up ; and Secretary 
Smith and Postmaster-General Blair stand together 
near him. 

The " still-life" or accessory portion of the picture is 
also fully furnished with meaning. Over the mantle-piece 
is the portrait of Andrew Jackson, who, after smashing 
nullification, prophesied that the South would attack 
the Government again, and that the pretext would be 
slavery; as if he were here present in the spirit to wit- 
ness the death-stroke of tlie enemy whose work he fore- 



4:6 ' THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

told in the flesh. Behind Mr. Chase is the picture of 
Secretary Stanton's predecessor in office, Simon Cam- 
eron, who was the first member of the Cabinet to avow 
the radical belief as to what should be done with the 
negro in the war. On the table before the President 
lies a parchn^ent . copy of the Constitution. Behind 
Mr. Seward is a portfolio marked " Commissions : War 
Department." »Above this, on the table, is a map marked 
" Seat of War in Virginia," and another, leaning against 
the table, shows the density of the slave population 
in the various parts of the South. In the foreground 
is Judge Whiting's strongly argued book on the 
" War Powers of the President ;" by its side, open on 
the floor, lies Story's " Comment-aries on the Consti- 
tution," and in a corner is a newspaper, to remind the 
spectator of the newspaper press, and its great influ- 
ence in the cause of emancipation. 

Mr. Carpenter's work is truly a historical painting. 
It represents the significant point and moment of a 
historical event of the very highest importance. It 
does this by placing permanently on record the faces 
and forms of the men who did the work, as they 
gathered and consulted over the crisis. And this 
it accomplishes wath the clearness, the largeness, the 
thoughtful truth and impressive moral power that be- 
long to unafiected simplicity and strict and conscien- 
tious adherence to fact. Besides the technical profes- 
sional value of the work as a specimen of composition, 
drawing, and color ; besides its even higher value as a 
collection of faithful and successful portraits, it has and 
always will have the very much greater value of an 
impressive and expressive monument to the enfranchise- 



THE riCTUEE. 47 

meiit of the negroes from slavery, and the greater en- 
franchisement of the United States of America from 
sustaining slavery. 

It remains to bring the history of Mr. Carpenter's 
great work down to the present time (December, 1866). 
After being finished, the pictm-e was exhibited to the 
public in New York and Boston, and also in many of 
the Western cities, with very great success. Previous 
to the opening of the exhibition in New York, upon 
the arrival .of the picture from Washington, while re- 
touching some injuries and remedying some defects in 
minor details, Mr. Car2:>enter worked upon it for thirty- 
siji: hours without intermission — a remarkable feat of 
physical and mental endurance ; and, it may be added, 
a violation of natural laws for which he subsequently 
suffered the penalty in a sickness which came near 
proving fatal. 

In Chicago and Milwaukie the picture was exhibited 
for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission, fairs in 
those two cities netting handsome sums in each place. 
The re-nomination, re-election, and re-inauguration of 
Mr. Lincoln for his second term aided from time to 
time in maintaining popular interest in the picture. 
While it was at Pittsburg the assassination of Mr. Lin- 
coln took place, and public interest in this imj^ressive 
portrait of himself and his constitutional advisers, one 
of whom, Mr. Seward, was also a victim to the conspir- 
acy, rose to such a pitch that, once at least, the doors 
of the exhibition room had actually to be closed, so un- 
governable was the pressure. For about a year from 
September, 1865, the picture was stored in Mr. Carpen- 
ter's studio. In the summer of 1866 the artist retouched 



4:8 THE ncTURE and the mejn. 

and cleaned it, and j)laced it on exhibition for a couple 
of days in Ins native town, Homer, N. Y. The fellow- 
townsmen of the painter, and the people of the vicinity 
for miles around, crowded the exhibition room, and the 
artist enjoyed the peculiar satisfaction of the prophet 
who does attain honor in his own country. 

It may interest the reader to know how so large a 
canvas (it is fourteen feet six inches long by nine feet 
in height) can be safely transj)orted about the country. 
This is accomplished by means of joints in the frame at 
top and bottom, which allow the picture to fold over 
upon itself from each end, thus reducing it within man- 
ageable dimensions. Creasing is prevented by laying 
a light and softly covered roller within the canvas at 
each folding place, and the whole being firmly screwed 
together and boxed, it travels in perfect security. 

Soon after the completion of the j^icture, Mr. A. H. 
Ritchie, of Kew York, the celebrated engraver, was 
engaged to reproduce it upon steel, in the highest style 
of the art. To fiicilitate this j^urpose Mr. Carpenter 
painted a small copy of his large painting, of the exact 
size of the proposed engraving — twenty-one by thirty- 
three inches. The engraver had nearly completed his 
work, after more than a year's constant labor, when the 
building containi«g his office was consumed by fire. 
The plate was saved through the wise precaution of 
Mr. J. C. Derby, w^ho was interested in its publication, 
in having it stored nights in a fire-proof building ; but 
the small copy of the large painting, valued at $2,500, 
was destroyed. This gave rise to a false report, widely 
circulated, that the original painting was lost ; this, unin- 
jured, still remains in the possession of Mr. Carpenter. 



THE riGTDKE. 49 

Sympathizing, as Mr. Ritchie did, in the aim and object 
of Mr. Carpenter's great work, he carried into his en- 
graving from it something of the same enthusiasm with 
which Mr. Carpenter was himself inspired. The result 
is an engraving which has been pronounced by high 
authority the finest work of its class ever produced in 
this country, and thus is placed within the reach of 
every loyal household in the land a treasure which 
must become more and more valuable with the lapse of 
time and the increasing gloiy of the republic. 



50 THE nCTUEE AND THE MEN. 

IV. 
LINCOLN. 

Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, in 
what was then Hardin, now Larue, County, Kentucky, 
on Nolen Creek. His earliest ancestor who can be 
determined, moved from Berks County, Pa., to Rock- 
ingham County, Virginia, in 1750. Thirty years after- 
ward, Abraham Lincoln, the President's grandfather, 
moved to Floyd's Creek, in Bullitt County, Ky., where 
he was killed by an Indian. His widow 6(^on remov- 
ed to Washington County. Her son Thomas mar- 
ried, in 1 806, Nancy Hanks, a Virginian, and the couple 
moved to Hardin County, where Abraham was born. 
The boy was born to poverty and hard work. In 1816 
he obtained a very little schooling, but it quickly ended, 
for the next year his father removed to Spencer County, 
Indiana, an unsettled region, where he built a log cabin. 
When Abraham was ten years of age his mother died. 
Although all his school-days together barely amount- 
ed to six months' time, still he worked at his stud- 
ies until he could not only read, but could write let- 
ters, which made him quite a sage, and often a scribe 
(but never a Pharisee), among his neighbors. At 
nineteen, young Lincoln, with a companion, took a 
flatboat-load of produce to New Orleans and sold 
it. During the down trip the two navigators beat 
oif seven negroes who attacked them with the design 
of capturing boat and cargo. In 1830 his father moved 



LINCOLN. 61 

again, to Macon County ; next year the young man made 
a second flatboat voyage to New Orleans, managing so 
•well that the owner who sent him employed him as 
clerk and manager of a flour-mill. In 1832 young Lin- 
coln enlisted as a volunteer in the Black Haw^k war, 
and was chosen captain of his company, serving faith- 
fully, though he saw no actual fighting. Just after 
the war he made his first entry into politics, by Tun- 
ing for the State Legislature, as a Clay man in opposi- 
tion to Jackson, and was beaten (the only time) in a con- 
test before the people. In his own precinct, however, 
he received 277 votes, out of the 284 cast. He now 
opened a store, and got the postmastership of the vil- 
lage, but had to sell out ; then tried surveying, but 
became embarrassed again in 1837, and his instruments 
were sold by the sheriff in execution. He had always 
spent what time he could in reading and study ; and 
he now gave up the idea of business, and went to read- 
ing law, with a view to a legal and political career. 
Beginning in 1834, he was elected to the State Legis" 
lature for four successive two-year terms, during which 
he gained considerable rej^utation as a speaker and a 
sensible man of business. In 1836 he was admitted 
to the bar, and in 1837 he settled in Springfield. At 
the end of his fourth legislative term, in 1842, he 
declined a re-nomination, in order to bring up his law 
studies ; and in the same year he married Mary Todd, 
daughter of Hon. Robert G. Todd, of Lexington, Ky. In 
1844 he stumped Illinois and part of Indiana, for Henry 
Clay, and in 1846 he was elected to Congress — the 
only Whig from Illinois — and by the startling majority 
of 1,511, where Henry Clay had only had 914 votes. 



62 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

While in Congress, with constitutional discrimination 
about principles, he voted for all supplies needed to 
carry on the Mexican war, but always refused to vote 
that the war had been justly begun. He was a dele- 
gate to the convention which nominated Gen. Taylor, 
in 1848, and labored hard in canvassing for him. Dur- 
ing this congressional term, Mr. Lincoln had frequently 
occasion to vote on questions involving slavery, and 
always voted for freedom. In January, 1849, he moved 
a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, 
but it was too soon for public opinion, and the bill 
failed. The Wilmot Proviso was often before the 
House, in consequence of efforts to apply it to recently 
acquired territory, and as Mr. Lincoln afterward said, 
he voted for it, " in one way or another, about forty 
times." 

At the end of this session, in March, 1849, Mr. Lin- 
coln declined a re-nomination ; and was during the 
year beaten as Whig candidate for United States 
Senator from Illinois. He now passed a number "of 
years at home, practicing his profession, and enjoying 
an increasing reputation as a lawyer and politician. 
During this time he invented his " camels," or machine 
for carrying a ship over bars or obstructions, of which 
a model is to be seen at the Patent Office in Washing- 
ton. This consisted of a couple of large cases that 
could be inflated somewhat after the fashion of a bel- 
lows. These were to be sunk empty, secured under 
the vessel, and then filled with air, so as to lift the ship. 

The Nebraska Bill was passed May 22, 1854, and in 
the following autumn the Illinois Legislature was to 
choose a United States Senator in place of Gen. Shields, 



LINCOLN. 53 

who had voted with Douglas for the repeal of the 
Missouri Compromise. It was important that Judge 
Douglas' own State should indorse his course, and he 
went himself into this canvass. So did Mr. Lincoln 
on the other part, and with the better fortune. He 
met Douglas in public debate, and it was generally- 
conceded on both sides that he decidedly gained the 
advantage of him, powerful debater as he was. The 
result of the canvass was accordingly the election of an 
anti-Nebraska legislature, and the choice of that able 
man and unswerving friend of freedom, Hon. Lyman 
Trumbull, for United States Senator. Mr. Trumbull 
liad been a Democrat ; and Mr. Lincoln having been a 
Whig, the friends of the latter were disposed to contest 
this choice, and to insist that Mr. Lincoln should be 
Senator. But with self-denying wisdom, he used his 
own personal influence to carry the votes of his friends 
to Mr. Trumbull, and thus secured his election. 

Mr. Lincoln's reputation was becoming national at 
the time of the Fremont and Buchanan campaign, and 
he had 110 votes for the nomination as Vice-President 
with Fremont, standing next to Mr. Dayton, who was 
the nominee. 

By this time Mr. Lincoln and Mr. .Douglas were the 
recognized leaders, in Illinois, on the two sides of the 
great political controversy of the day. As Mr. Ray- 
mond says, in his "Life of Lincoln," "Whenever Mr. 
Douglas made a speech, the people instinctively an- 
ticipated a reply from Mr. Lincoln." In June, 1 85 7, Mr. 
Douglas made, at Springfield, that speech which publicly 
committed him to the support of the Lecompton Con- 
stitution and of the Dred Scott decision. Mr. Lincoln, 



54: THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

two weeks afterward, replied in a speech at tlie same 
place, and these speeches were a sort of preface to the 
famous series of Lincoln-Douglas debates the next year, 
wliich firmly established Mr. Lincoln's reputation as a 
wise and just politician, and as a powerful speaker 
and skillful and ready debater. The two combatants 
were in that year candidates for the United States sen- 
atorship, to be determined by the Legislature then to be 
chosen. On one hand, Mr. Douglas' fortunes were 
staked on the election, because if his own State would 
not continue him in the Senate, he would evidently not 
be available on his intended further road as a Presiden- 
tial candidate. And on the other hand, the Republi- 
cans of Illinois felt it supremely important to register 
the powerful voice of their great State in favor of free- 
dom, and against the oppressive measures forced on 
the citizens of Kansas. Each of the candidates had 
already pretty well defined his position, as they had 
spoken thrice each in June and July of that year 
(1858); when, on July 24, Mr. Lincohi challenged Mr. 
Douglas to meet him in a seiies of public debates dur- 
ing the pending campaign. Mr. Douglas, after a cor- 
respondence wliich indicates some reluctance to venture 
on the contest, offered a programme of seven debates, 
in four of which he was to have the opening and closing 
turns, Mr. Lincoln to have them only in the other three. 
But Mr. Lincoln, confident in- his own plain, keen, and 
weighty reasoning, and straightforward, clear, common 
sense, and in the overwhelming justice and rightfulness 
of his cause, readily accepted the proposition, and the 
meetings were held. 

The seven places of meethiq; were in as many diflTer- 



LINCOLN. 55 

ent portions of the State, and the series of debates 
caused a very deep and genuine excitement. Each party 
greeted and welcomed and " celebrated^' its champion 
by the ordinary means of marching in long rows, wav- 
ing flags, employing brass bands, shouting, and firing of 
cannon. But these common and cheap manifestations 
were underlaid and intensified into a real meaning, by 
the confidence of each party in its champion, by a keen 
enjoyment on the part of the audience of every good 
point on a principle, and every successful hit at the 
opponent, and still more by the profound conviction 
everywhere felt that the rights of man and the foim- 
dation principles of American civilization were really 
in dispute. The result of the canvass was, that on the 
popular vote, the Republican vote was 4,144 more than 
that of Douglas ; but so shrewdly had the State been 
districted in the Democratic interest, that that party 
had a working majority in the Legislature, and Mr. 
Doudas was elected Senator. If Mr. Lincoln had sue- 
ceeded, doubtless he would not afterward have become 
President. 

The Presidential election, of November, 1860, was 
approaching. As early as in February of that year 
Mr. Lincoln was invited by the New York Young 
Men's Republican Club to speak in that city on the 
political issues of the times. This he did, at Cooper 
Institute, Feb. 2'7th; delivering a sj^eech full of wisdom, 
knowledge, and unanswerable political and statesman- 
like reasoning. That speech especially, in connection 
also with those afterward delivered in New England, 
gave Mr. Lincoln as higli a reputation nt the East as 
he had at the West. 



56 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

The consequence of these speeches was undoubtedly 
that Mr. Lincoln was at least the second choice of the 
Chicago Convention from the start. He was nominated 
for President at Chicago on Friday, May 18, 1860, was 
elected Xov. 6, 1860, was re-elected in Nov., 1864, and 
having led the country successfully through the most 
powerful and dangerous rebellion of the world's history, 
was assassinated by J. Wilkes Booth on the evening 
of Friday, April 14th, 1865, and died early the next 
morning. 

It is unnecessary to attempt here any formal ac- 
count of Mr. Lincoln's actions while President, or 
of that vast expression of national mourning which 
attended his funeral corterpe from Washington to 
Springfield. The fiicts of the war, the facts of that 
unprecedented funeral, are sufficiently known. The 
purpose of the present sketch will be better served by 
an arrangement of some reminiscences and anecdotes 
of the man, so treated as to form an illustration of the 
principal points in his character. 

Mr. Lincoln, as President of the United States, bore 
a load of responsibility and of difficulty beyond all 
comparison greater than was ever imposed not only 
upon any other President, but upon any other citizen 
of the United States as such. His vexations and per- 
plexities find no parallel in our national history, except 
in those of Washington, as commander-in-chief and 
dictator during the Revolution. The great picture 
which this little book is meant to illustrate, commem- 
orates the act which Avas the central and crownhig one 
of Mr. Lincoln's official life, and he occupies by right 
the central place in the picture, his face wearing a 



LINCOLN. 57 

characteristic expression of patience, melancholy, kind- 
ness, and perhaps a faint touch of humor. In. his hand 
he holds the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, 
which he has just read to the assembled Cabinet ; and 
thoughtful and intent, he is listening with surprised 
interest — for he had never thought of the point before 
— to the weighty suggestion of Secretary Seward to 
wait for a victory. 

The chief significance of Mr. Lincoln as a historical 
personage depends on his being a wonderfully true rep- 
resentative of the American character — that is, of the 
character of the American of the Northwest ; for that 
region at this day controls the United vStates. It is as 
a representative man that he will possess the most just 
fame, and accordingly it is interesting to observe how 
the leading traits in his character as an individual cor- 
respond to the leading traits in our national character. 

HONESTY. 

A Mr. Crawford lent Mr. Lincoln, when a boy, a 
copy of Weems' " Life of Washington," which lie was 
eagerly reading in the intervals of his labor. He left 
it through one stormy night so near the chinky wall of 
the log cabin, that the rain drove in upon it, soaked 
the book, and quite ruined its looks. Abraham was 
entirely without money, but with a natural rectitude 
perhaps equal to that of the hero of the spoiled volume, 
he promptly carried it to Mr. Crawford, showed it, told 
how the harm happened, and offered to work out the 
damage. Crawford, with good judgment, gave the 
honest little fellow the book, in return for-three days' 
work at pulling fodder ; and the incident gained him 



58 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

the lastins: esteem of the Crawfords and of the neiirh- 
borhood. 

An entirely similar mixture of rectitude and inde- 
pendence of character was shown in the account given 
by Pollard Simmons about a county survey. Simmons, 
it appears, met Genei^al Ewing (in charge of the United 
States Surveys in the Northwest Territory), while Mr. 
Lincoln was a needy young man, and asked for a job 
for him. The General looked into his papers, and said 
that such a county needed surveying; Mr. Lincoln 
might do that ; the pay would be ^600. Simmons, in 
great delight, told young Lincoln the great news as 
soon as he got home, and was astounded to hear him 
reply that he didn't think he would undertake the job. 
" In the name of wonder, why ?" asked poor Simmons ; 
" six hundred dollars doesn't grow on every bush out 
here in Illinois !'* *' I know that," was the answer, " and 
I need the money bad enough, Simmons, as you know ; 
but I never have been under obligations to a Demo- 
cratic administration, and I never intend to be as long 
as I can get my living another way. General Ewing 
must find another man to do his work." 

When Mr. Lincoln Avas a practicing lawyer, a post- 
office agent came in one day and asked for him. On 
finding him, the agent said he wanted to collect a sum 
of money due the Department since the office at "New 
Salem was discontinued. Mr. Lincoln — for he was the 
ex-postmaster of New Salem — looked a little puzzled, 
and a friend who was present, seeing this, offered to 
furnish the money, but Mr. Lincoln, suddenly rising, 
went and fished out a little old trunk from a pile of 
books, and asked the agent what was the amount of 



LINCOLN. 59 

his demand. The man told it — it was over seventeen 
dollars. Mr. Lincoln unlocked the trunk, took out 
a parcel of coin done up in a rag, opened it, count- 
ed it, and handed it to the agent. It was the exact 
sum. " I never use any man's money except my own," 
said Mr. Lincoln, when the agent had left. Though ho 
Iiad passed through much poverty and privation since 
leaving the post-office, he had always had that money 
ready in the rag. 

He found no difficulty in apj)lying his principle to 
the famous lawyer's problem, of " How to do right 
when you know your client is in the wrong." On this 
point Mr. Lincoln seems never to have satisfied himself 
with the common arguments that " the client may be 
right after all ; that every man has a right to have his 
side stated as well as it can be, and the other client 
will have his side stated so ; that the best plan for the 
judge or jury is to have the two sides each stated at 
their best, each without reference to the other." ThesQ 
reasonings, which lead easily to sophistications, tricks, 
and lies, Mr. Lincoln never relished ; and his less 
squeamish colleagues used to say that he was even 
" perversely honest." It was perfectly well known 
that if he found liimself on the wrong side, his help 
was worth little. He could not jjut his heart into an 
unjust cause. He would never engage on the wrong 
side if he could find it out, but made it a rule to deter- 
mine the right and wrong of the case before taking it 
up, and if the client was wrong, he refused the work 
and the fee, and told the applicant that he had no case, 
and ought not to go to law. Clients will sometimes 
fool their own lawyers and deceive them about the case. 



60 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Mr. Lincoln was once or twice so dealt with; but even 
in the middle of the suit, if the testimony revealed 
such a fact, the whole audience could see Mr. Lincoln's 
interest in his case fall and die, and the rest of his labor 
in it was merely fonnal. On one such occasion, where 
he had an associate counsel, Mr. Lincoln promptly in- 
formed him that he should not make the argument in 
the case ; the associate made it, won the cause, receiv- 
ed the fee — nine hundred dollars — and offered Mr. Lin- 
coln his share. The upright lawyer would not touch 
a cent of it. He was once defending a person who had 
delivered certain lambs where sheep were contracted 
fca\ This fact did not appear until the testimony show- 
ed it on the trial. When that happened, Mr. Lincoln 
simply examined the witnesses to find how many such 
lambs were delivered, and when he addressed the jury, 
he plainly told them that their business was to give a 
verdict aorainst his client, and that all he asked of them 
was to judge justly as to the extent of damages. In an- 
other case he had successfully sued a railroad company, 
and was about to have judgment, a certain offset being 
proved against his client, which offset was of course to 
be deducted from the amount of the judgment. But 
just in time to correct an error, the honest lawyer rose 
and informed the court that the offset against his client 
ought to be larger by such and such a sum, which he 
proceeded to describe and allow; and the court de- 
ducted it accordingly. It is no wonder that such a 
man was called " perversely honest." He was a capi- 
tal lawyer for honest men, but a miserable lawyer for 
scoundrels. 

A similar scnipulous honesty was shown in his habit 



LINCOLN. Gl 

of dividing joint fees when he received them. He al- 
ways did this with each separate fee, setting his asso- 
ciate's portion aside in its own parcel, with the owner's 
name and that of the case in which it was received. 
This was only a habit, but it strongly marks the prin 
ciple. 

This ingrained instinctive honesty was, however, a 
principal element of his power as a lawyer and as a 
speaker. What jury could resist a prepossession to 
begin with, in favor of a man who, it was perfectly no- 
torious, always refiised cases he did not believe in? 
Ko man alive could help being disposed to give him a 
verdict under such circumstances. What listener be- 
fore the orator's platform could help feeling the influ- 
ence of the visible effort to state the exact truth, which 
so singularly fills period after period of all Mr. Lincoln's 
arguments ? The contrast between his j^ainfally earn- 
est, homely, direct struggle after mere fact as such, and 
the skillful contrivances of the trained politician's ef- 
forts to make out a case, is wonderfully clear in the 
speeches of the great seiies of debates with Mr. Doug- 
las. As the reader passes from one to the other and 
back again, he feels a change of moral atmosphere, 
almost like that of alternating between a juggler's gas- 
lit exhibition-room and a cool sunshiny morning land- 
scape. 

Before delivering that speech at Springfield which so 
clearly and ably defined the essence of the whole ques- 
tion of slavery and anti-slavery, Mr. Lincoln made an 
experiment on his law partner, Mr. Herndon, which 
showed the same honesty in arguing a political point as 
he used in arguing a legal point. Just before going to 



C8 THE PICTUKE AlfD THE MEN. 

the meeting he locked himself in with Mr. Ilerndon, 
and reading him the first paragraph of the speech, ask- 
ed, " What do you think of it ?" " I think it is all 
true," was the reply, " but I doubt whether it is good 
policy to say it now." "That," said Mr. Lincoln, 
" makes no difference. It is the truth, and the nation 
is entitled to it." 

The utter and uncompromising honesty of the man 
soaked and colored all his life. It was as quietly 
prompt and effective on the question of the Presidential 
nomination as on the question of the old rain-sopped 
book. They telegraphed to him when the Chicago 
Convention was in session, that to carry the Conven- 
tion he must have the votes of two delegations named, 
and that for this he must pledge himself if elected to 
put the chiefs of those delegations into his Cabinet. He 
spoke instantly back by the wires, with Lincolnian 
morals and phrase, " I authorize no bargains, and will 
be bound by none." 

COUKAGE. 

Mr. Lincoln possessed abundance of courage, both 
physical and moral ; but of his physical courage it is 
to be remarked that it was much more likely to be 
aroused by offenses against honor or by abuses prac- 
ticed on tho defenseless than by any impositions on 
himself. He was far from heimr a fiirhter like General 
Jackson ; and in fact so predominant was his kindliness 
and shrinking from causing pain to others, that he only 
bestirred himself when driven to the farthest endurable 
limit. On one of his flatboat trips to New Orleans he 
and his sole companion, armed with billets of wood. 



LINCOLN. 63 

met and thoroughly thrashed and defeated seven ne- 
groes, who made a night attack on their boat. When 
he kept a little grocery, and a local bully used some 
coarse language before some women, Lincoln asked 
him to refrain, and being rudely challenged in conse- 
quence, wrestled with the fellow, threw him, and w^ith 
an odd, grim jocularity held him down and rubbed 
smart weed into his face and eyes until he roared in 
agony. But then releasing him, he at once did all in 
his power to relieve the pain, with so much genuine 
good-nature that the beaten bully became his life-long 
friend. When a gang of roughs in the neighborhood 
forced him into a contest with their champion, and clos- 
ing on him in the struggle jointly leveled him to the 
earth as he was winning in the combat, he was neither 
enraged nor scared, but jumped up, joked over his own 
defeat, and by sheer good -nature made them all so 
much his friends that they invited him to become of 
their worshipful company. This honor he thankfully 
declined, but retained their friendship. Once when a 
gang of political roughs threatened and attempted to 
drive Colonel Baker oif a platform, Mr. Lincoln unex- 
pectedly dropped down through a scuttle in the ceiling 
to Colonel Baker's side and coolly observed, " This is a 
land of freedom of speech. Mr. Baker has a right to 
speak. Ko man shall take him from the stand if I can 
prevent it." And they gave up the attempt. When 
Mr. Linder, a powerful speaker, had been threatened 
with violence for things uttered in a speech that was 
disagreeable to the Democrats, Mr. Lincoln and Colo- 
nel Baker alone escorted him safe home to his hotel. 
Plots and plans for the assassination of M-i*. Lincoln 



64 TUE riCTUKE AND THE MEN. 

were diligently contrived from the time of his first nom- 
ination at Chicago until the final successful attempt in 
1865. So many letters did he receive which threat- 
ened his life, that he kept a separate file of them. " The 
first one or two," he said to Mr. Carpenter, " made me 
feel a little uncomfortable, but I came at length to look 
for a regular installment of this kind of correspondence 
in every week's mail, and up to inauguration-day I was 
in constant receipt of such letters. It is no uncommon 
thing to receive them now [March, 1864, the year be- 
fore his death], but they have ceased to give me any 
apprehension." When the artist expressed his surprise 
at this, Mr. Lincoln answered, after his quaint fashion, 
" Oh, there's nothing like getting used to things !" 
When he left home for his first inauguration, an attempt 
was made to throw the train from the track ; then a 
hand-grenade was found secreted in the cars ; then an 
organization to assassinate him was found to exist at 
Baltimore. Yet he deviated not one inch from his pro- 
posed route, with the sole exception that he went from 
Harrisburg to Washington one train earlier than had 
been intended. He hoisted the flag at Philadelphia, 
spoke at Harrisburg, and moved and acted in all other 
particulars exactly on the pre-arranged plan, as if no- 
body could be killed by violence. All the arguments 
and remonstrances of his friends at Washington failed 
to reconcile him to the presence of the escort that pru- 
dence did in fact require. When General Wadsworth 
on one occasion sent such an escort, in part actually 
against his will, he complained that Mr. Lincoln and he 
"couldn't hear themselves talk" for the rattle of sabers 
and spurs, and that he was much more afraid of being 



LINCOLN. 66 

shot in consequence of the inexperience of some green 
cavalryman than of being seized by any of Jeb 
Stuart's troopers. He used to walk and ride about 
Washington at all hours, by day or by night, alone or 
■with some single friend ; and Colonel Halpine, then on 
General Halleck's staff, over and over again reminded 
his superiors of the total defenselessness of the Presi- 
dent. " Any assassin, or maniac," says Colonel Hal- 
pine, " seeking his life, could enter his presence without 
the interference of a single armed man to hold him 
back. The entrance doors, and all doors on the official 
side of the building, were open at all hours ot the day, 
and very late into the evening ; and I have many times 
entered the mansion and walked up to the rooms of the 
two private secretaries as late as nine or ten o'clock at 
night, without seeing or being challenged by a single 
soul." Mr. Lincoln was convinced that his death would 
not heljD the rebels, and he seemed to think that they 
would reason in like manner, and not seek his life. 
The ease with which such reasonin2:s satisfied him 
shows that he was brave enough, but the mistake was 
sadly demonstrated by the fact that he was killed in 
just the way he thought out of the question, when 
there was no longer any rebel confederacy to encour- 
age, and by exactly such means as a proper escort 
would have effectually prevented. 

Mr. Lincoln's moral courage w^as even greater than 
his physical. Indeed, he said that he thought himself 
a great coward physically — though he was certainly 
partly at least in jest — and he added, "Moral coward- 
ice is something which I think I never had." 

While Mr. Lincoln Avas practicing law in Springfield, 



66 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

the Other lawyers in that city had, most of them, some 
political ambition, and accordingly they were shy of 
any legal business likely to make them unpopular, 
and particularly of defending men accused of help- 
ing fugitive slaves to escape. At that time it was com- 
monly considered in that region that catching and sur- 
rendering " fugitives from labor" was a constitutional 
duty to be performed with alacrity. Even that high- 
Bpirited man Edward D. Baker — afterward killed at 
Ball's Bluff—in those days, when applied to profession- 
ally by a person sued for helping off a fugitive slave, 
plainly refused, and said openly that he could not afford 
it as a political man. The defendant then consulted an 
anti-slavery friend, who at once recommended Lincoln. 
" He^s not afraid of an unpopular case," said he ; 
"when I go for a lawyer to defend an arrested fugi- 
tive slave, other lawyers will refuse me ; but if Mr. 
Lincoln is at home, he will always take my case." 

Having made up his mind what was the real scope 
and bearing of the political controversy which Mr. 
Douglas was trying to conduct on his " popular sover- 
eignty" principle exclusively, Mr. Lincoln had not only 
the foresight to judge coiTectly what course was best 
for the political future, and the rectitude to unreserv- 
edly adopt that course as his own on principle, but the 
moral courage — in his Springfield speech of July, 1858 
— ^to avow the whole, clear, broad grounds of tliis line 
of action, when even the party and personal friends 
who were putting themselves into his hands by nomi- 
nating him for the senatorship, judged that it would 
be better to be silent. How just his perceptions were, 
and how truly the heart of the people responded to the 



LINCOLN. 67 

key-note which he struck, was splendidly shown by his 
actually beating Mr. Douglas on the popular vote, 
though he failed of a majority and was " gerryman- 
dered" out of ai^ election in the ^legislature. 

When he became President, his moral courage was 
certainly not less required nor less conspicuous. With- 
out experience in war, diplomacy, or high executive 
office, he found himself obliged to assume the responsi- 
bility of taking prompt and very critical and important 
steps in all three. Only waiting to discover w^hat 
needed to be done, he did not fail to do it when the 
right time came, > He called out : seventy-five thousand 
volunteei*s ; he blockaded the Southern ports; he seized 
all the telegraph dispatches on file in all the offices of 
the country for a year back ; and did other acts of like 
kind, for which there was not, strictly speaking, any 
legal authority. It is true that these measures were 
necessary, w^ere so jugded by the Cabinet, and were 
morally certain to be legalized by Congress ; but would 
Mr. Buchanan have had the moral courage to do them ? 
By no means ; and the burden of their responsibility was 
a grave one ev-en for the strong shoulders of Mr. Lincoln. 

The same perfectly cool morul courage, acting always 
wdth a careful waiting upon the dictates of his slow 
and patient and fearless judgment, but acting with the 
most perfect promptness when the time came, was evi- 
dent on many a subsequent occasion. Whether he 
acted or refrained from acting, neither the threats and 
a,buse of, enemies, nor the anger and impatience of 
friends, nor any fear of the face of man moved him. 
He Avanted no help in doing right — he only w^anted 
consultation to convince him what right was. When 



68 THE PICTUBE AND THE MEN. 

a foolish staff-officer, Major Key, had the incolence to 
tell him to his face that the gcDerals in the field had a 
political policy of their own not to win battles, he in- 
stantly dismissed him from the sendee. When he 
thought best to prepare his Emancipation Proclamation 
he did so, and this time without asking advice of any- 
body. Just as steadily he postponed issuing it until the 
right day, and just as promptly, when that day came, 
he sent it forth. 

"VVKATH. 

Long-suffering and kindly as he was, Mr. Lincoln 
could become powerfully angiy. This, however, was 
far harder where only he himself was concerned, than 
where his country, some important and highly valued 
interest, a friend, or some lowly and helpless person 
were concerned. A poor negro steamboat-hand, from 
Springfield or the vicinity, had been imprisoned in New 
Orleans, merely for being a free negro from out of the 
State, and was in danger of being . sold for jail fees. 
Mr. Lincoln, finding that the Governor of Illinois had 
no power to do anything to j)revent this rascality, 
jumped up, exclaiming, "By the Almighty, I'll have 
that negro back, or I'll have a twenty years' agitation 
in Illinois, until the Governor can do something in the 
premises." And he would have done it, had not some 
money been sent forward in time to rescue the poor 
fellow. The strongest expression of indignation that 
Mr. Carpenter ever heard him use was with reference 
to the Wall Street gold-gamblers, about the time of 
the Proclamation. "For jny part," he exclaimed to 
Governor Curtin, and striking the table with his clinch- 
ed fist, " I wish every one of them had his devilish 



LINCOLN. 69 

head shot off!" An officer deservedly dismissed the 
service tormented the President with repeated state- 
ments of a case that was bad on his own showing, and 
on his third visit was impudent enough to say, " Well, 
Mr. President, I see you are fully determined not to do 
me justice !" Mr. Lincoln, his lips slightly closing to- 
gether, quietly rose up, laid down the papers in his 
hand, seized the fellow by the coat-collar, walked him 
by main strength to the door and flung him into the 
passage, saying, " Sir, I give you fair warning never to 
show youi-self in this room again — I can bear censure, 
but not insult !" Once at least, when some rebel 
women were impudent to him, he ordered them per- 
emptorily to be shown out of the house, 

DESPONDENCY. 

The profound despondency which sometimes seized 
Mr. Lincoln was no disproof either of his strength and 
courage, or of his firm faith in the right. Such tempo- 
rary affections were in part constitutional — for a vein 
of melancholy ran through his character — and were in 
part the result of the long and terrible draughts of the 
war upon his physical and mental forces. One day, in 
the midst of reports from the Wilderness battle-ground, 
Mr. Lincoln, with a face, tone, and manner of profound 
sadness and doubt, said to one of his personal and polit- 
ical friends, " Has it ever occurred to you that in view 
of the bad fortune that we have suffered so often and 
so long, and in such important instances, it may be that 
after all we are perhaps in the wrong ? That the Lord 
is showing us that we are wrong?" And the friend 
answered him with similar sentiments, " Yes, it has, a 



70 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

great many times." Yet such feelings never varied the 
direct line of his public policy or of his public utterances. 

INDUSTRY— PEKSEVEKANCE. 

Mr. Lincoln was industrious and persevering. In- 
deed, like other self-made men, had he not possessed a 
remarkable share of those qualities, he would have re- 
mained obscm-e. He was almost as poor as poor can 
be. His father's whole estate, when they removed to 
Indiana, was worth just about $300, and two thirds of 
this was lost by a capsize in the river while moving. 
Th& boy grew up in a sheer necessity of severe, un- 
taught hard Jabor* . In this his strength was consumed* 
His whole " education" covered just over one year of 
school attendance, and that at little district schools — and 
scatteringly, here a little and there less, so as to make the 
total as ineffective as possible. But with his own delib- 
erate slow strength, he toiled with immense toil after 
what he felt was lacking. Reading whatever good books 
he could grasp, he wrote out a careful analysis of each 
after finishing it — a task which few would ever begin, 
and only the fewest of the few would ever continue or 
complete. Pollard Simmons, a work-fellow with him 
in his youth, thus reported of him on this point, in 1 856 
or thereabout : " Abe Lincoln was the likeliest boy in 
God's world. He would work all day as hard as any 
of us, and study by fire-light in the log-house half the 
night, and in this way he made himself a thorough 
practical surveyor." 

He passed one summer and fall as " hired man" with 
a Mr. Armstrong ; and his earnest and diligent studies 
during that time so pleased his employer as to produce 



LINCOLN". 71 

*an offer to keep the youth through the winter, while he 
should continue at work at his books. The offer Avas 
accepted, though only on condition that the boarder 
should work enough to pay for his board. 

He always remained deeply conscious of the serious 
misfortune of his early lack of culture ; and with the 
same steady, deliberate, ceaseless effort sought to make 
up for it. He was " always thinking," the Illinois law- 
yers said ; and he was reckoned an " improving man." 
From the time of his election to the Presidency ho 
never knew what real rest or leisure was, but laboring 
up to the limit of his strength and far beyond it, he 
toiled straight forward, though conscious that he was 
exhausting himself. He had a distinct presentiment, 
which he avowed to more than one friend, that he 
would not outlive the rebellion, and he felt plainly that 
his labors were exhausting him. He had no fear of 
being murdered, and he undoubtedly felt that he was 
drying up the springs of his life by labor. He grew 
over-tired, wiry and powerful and enduring as he was. 
He remarked that such snatches of repose as he got 
" never reached the tired spot." During the last two 
year* of his life, the progress of this exhaustion was 
shown "by the perceptible coming on and increase of a 
certain nervous irritability, very far from his habitual 
quiet, easy kindliness of manner. But fresh or weary, 
his steady industry never once failed. 

KINDNESS. 

It seems scarcely possible for any human being to 
have been more thoroughly friendly, kindly, and free 
from hatred, revenge, jealousy, or ill- wishing than was 



72 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Mr. Lincoln. To many a woman and child, great and 
small, he was the same sweet-minded and beneficently- 
disposed man. Doubtless he wished as well to the rich 
and great as to the poor and helpless, but very natu- 
rally he found more good opportunities to help the lat- 
ter, and more of them have been put on record. 

The teacher of the Mission School at the Five Points 
House of Industry, in New York city, has given the 
following enthusiastic account of Mr. Lincoln's bearing 
even among children. It is a narrative of his visit to 
the school during liis Eastern campaigning trip in 1860. 
" Our Sunday-school," says the teacher, " in the Five 
Points was assembled one Sabbath morning, when I 
noticed a tall, remarkable-looking man enter the room 
and take a seat among us. He listened with fixed at- 
tention to our exercises, and his countenance expressed 
such genuine interest that I approached him and sug- 
gested that he might be willing to say something to 
the children. He accepted the invitation with evident 
pleasure ; and coming forward, began a simple address 
which at once fascinated every little hearer and hushed 
the room into silence. His language was strikingly 
beautiful, and his tones musical with intensest feeling. 
The little faces around him would droop into sad con- 
viction as he uttered sentences of warning, and would 
lighten into sunshine as he spoke cheerful words of 
promise. Once or twice he attempted to close his re- 
marks ; but the imperative shout of ' go on ! oh, do go 
on !' would compel liim to resume. As I looked upon 
the gaunt and sinewy frame of the stranger, and mark- 
ed his powerful head and determined features, now 
touched into softness by the impressions of the moment. 



LINCOLN. 



73 



I felt an irrepressible curiosity to learn something more 
about him ; and when he was quietly leaving the room 
I begged to know his name. He courteously replied, 
* It is Abraham Lincoln, from Illinois.' " 

Mr. Lincoln loved children and babies with a love 
much like that which women have for them. A woman 
whose husband was to be unjustly shot, had waited, 
her baby in her arms, for three days, in the President's 
ante-room, w^hen Mr. Lincoln, in leaving his office fbr 
some refreshment, lieard the child cry. He "went 
straight back to the office, rang the bell for his usher, 
and said, " Daniel, is there a woman with a baby in the 
ante-room ?" The usher said there was, and — know- 
ing what was the poor woman's case — he added that 
her errand w^as one of life and death, and that he 
ought to see her. He ordered her instantly in ; she told 
her stoiy, and her husband was pardoned. As she 
came out of the room with her eyes lifted up, her 
lips moving in prayer, the tears streaming down her 
cheeks, old Daniel plucked her shawl and told her 
who was her advocate. " Madam," said he, " it was 
the baby that did it." 

One of the editors of the Chicago Tribune says : " I 
dropped in upon Mr. Lincoln and found him busily en- 
gaged in counting greenbacks. * This, sir,' said he, * is 
something out of my usual line ; but a President of the 
United States has a multiplicity of duties not specified 
in the Constitution or Acts of Congress. This is one 
of them. This money belongs to a poor negro, who is 
a porter in the Treasury Department, and at present 
very sick with small-pox. He is now in the hospital, 
and could not drav/ his pay because he could not sign 



74 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

his name. I have been at considerable trouble to over- 
come the difficulty and get it for him ; and have at 
length succeeded in " cutting the red tapCj" as you news- 
paper men say. I am dividing the money and putting 
by a portion labeled in an envelope, according to his 
wish.'" More than once he helped poor clients, not 
only with free advice, but with gifts of money. Dur- 
ing his great debates with Douglas, the two contest- 
ants, with equally creditable good sense and good feel- 
ing, rode together to or from their appointments in the 
^ame vehicle, chatting as pleasantly as if instead of 
trying each to get into the Senate and keep the other 
out, they were old friends meeting by pleasant chance. 
The innate, iiTCsistible, completely instinctive char- 
acter of the kindness of Mr. Lincoln is, pei-haps, most 
strongly shown where it made him simply incapable of 
acquiescing in or inflicting suffering at such ; the im- 
pulse being as nnreasoning as that which makes a 
person jump away from a scald with boiling water. 
Riding an Illinois circuit one day, he found a pig, 
struggling in some deep mud, and evidently nearly ex- 
hausted ; the sight hurt him, but having on a new suit 
of clothes, he reluctantly rode on. But piggy had 
got hold of the lawyer's heart-strings ; the farther he 
went the more uneasy he became, and at the end of two 
miles he turned round, rode back, made a bridge of 
rails out into the mud, dugout the pig, and then resum- 
ed his journey, with very muddy clothes, but with liis 
mind at ease. As characteristic as the kindness, was 
the self-analysis that followed. He fell to considering 
what his motive had been. At first he said to himself 
that it was benevolence; but he concluded in the end 



jsu:* rtu -: LiNcoi^N". 75 

that it was selfishness ; for he rescued the pig, he said, 
" in order to take a pain out of his own mind." 

Tliis irresistible shrinking from inflicting or allowing 
suffering, no matter for what purpose, was perhaps 
more strikingly exempUfied in Mr. Lincoln's practice 
about the pardon of deserters and other convicted 
criminals, and on the military question of retaliation, 
than in any other case. The real justice of the case, 
the military bearings of it, the result of the decision on 
society, or the influence of his action on others tempted 
to imitate the offense, seemed to be considerations 
almost without Yy^eight in Mr. Lincoln's mind, in com- 
parison with his invincible reluctance to inflict pain. 
The instinct was as unreasoning as would be that of 
a surgeon who should refuse to cut off a limb from 
dread of giving j^ain, even though the pain would save 
a life. Judge Bates said that he had sometimes told 
Mr. Lincoln that he was unfit to be trusted with the 
pardoning power, because he was so sure to be over- 
persuaded by beseechings, and particularly by the 
prayers and tears of w^omen. Secretary Stanton and 
the generals in the field were often much vexed at hav- 
ing Mr. Lincoln mitigating or remitting punishments 
which they felt were indispensable for the good of the 
service. . A well-executed representation of the sorrow 
of a deserter's or criminal's friends wa§ all but certain 
to save the delinquent's life, and of course the result 
often was to turn a hardened scoundrel loose to 23rey 
on the community. When Mr. Colfax had specially 
urged the sj^aring of the life of a son of a certain con- 
stituent of the Speaker's, about to be shot for desertion, 
the President said, "Some of our generals complain 



76 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

that I impair discipline and subordination in the anny 
by my pardons and respites, but it makes me rested, 
after a hard day's work, if I can find some good excuse 
for saving a man's life, and I go to bed happy as I think 
how joyous the signing of my name will make him and 
liis family and friends." After pardoning, on his 
mother's . solicitation, a man condemned to death, the 
President said : " Perhaps I have done wrong, but at 
all events I have made that poor woman happy." 

It is no wonder that doing such deeds transfigured 
the gaunt and homely President into an angel of light 
in the eyes of those whom he was blessing. On the 
recommendation of Mr. Stevens, he had one day given 
to an old lady a pardon for her son. In leaving the 
White House, with Mr. Stevens, the old lady all at 
once cried out, in an excited way, " I knew it was a 
copperhead lie !" " What, madam ?" asked her com- 
panion. " Why," she exclaimed again, with vehemence, 
" they told me he was an ugly-looking man. He is the 
handsomest man I ever saw in my life !" 

Mr. Lincoln had some idea of his own weakness in 
this particular. In a case of application to pardon a 
man of previous good character, but sentenced for 
manslaughter, the President replied, " Well, gentlemen, 
leave your papers, and I will have the Attorney-Gen- 
eral, Judge Bates, look them over, and we will see 
what can be done. Being both of us pigeon-hearted 
fellows, the chances are that if there is any ground 
whatever for interference, the scoundrel will get off." 

Even when the infliction of suftering was the only 
and the sure way of saving far greater suffering, Isly. 
Lincoln could not do it. One of his generals found 



LINCOLN. 77 

that deserters could not be shot, though desertion was 
actually seriously weakening the army ; and he went 
to Washington and said so. "Mr. President," he 
urged, " unless these men are made an example of, the 
army itself is in danger. Mercy to the few is cruelty 
to the many." "Mr. General," said the President, 
"there are already too many weeping widows in the 
United States. For God's sake don't ask me to add to 
the number, for I won't do it." When ample and 
authenticated news was laid before him of the tortur- 
ing of our men to death by slow starvation in the rebel 
prisons, Mr. Lincoln was profoundly moved. It was 
urged upon him, and justly too, that the only possible 
remedy was prompt and stern retaliation. But he said 
to Mr. Odell, " I can never, never starve men like that. 
Whatever others may say or do, I never can, and I 
never will be accessory to such treatment of human 
beings." Even fui'tlier : after the awful devilism of the 
Fort Pillow massacre, and when in a speech at the 
Baltimore Fair he had pledged himself in public that 
there should be a retaliation for it, yet no step or move 
toward retaliation was ever taken. For Mr. Lincolij 
it was simply an impossibility. The extreme extent of 
this incapacity was assuredly a defect in Mr. Lincoln's 
character ; but over-kindliness is not the fault which has 
done most evil in this world. Mr. Bates, in a conver- 
sation with Mr. Carpenter, once referred to this trait as 
the single flaw in Mr. Lincoln's character. " Mr. 
Lincoln," he said, " comes very near being a perfect 
man, according to my ideal of manhood. He lacks 
but one thing." "Is that official dignity as Presi- 
dent ?" inquired the painter. " No," was the rej^ly. 



78 THE nCTUKE AND THE MEN. 

" that is of little consequence. His deficiency is in the 
element oi loilV But this is not exactly the way to 
state it. The defect was based on two thino^s : a too 
small faculty for feeling anger, and a too great and 
sensitive faculty for feeling the sufferings of others. He 
had will enough, but these two mental characteristics, 
standing behind the will, fixed it immovably in a reso- 
lution that he " never could and never would" do such 
and guch things. 

SIMPLICITY, UNAFFECTEDNESS. 

A very prominent trait in Mr. Lincoln was his entire 
freedom from pride, affectation, assumption, or show of 
any kind. His ways were singularly unconscious, and 
even when any fact or characteristic of himself came in 
question, he recognized it or stated it exactly as it was, 
the mere fact appearing to be all that he required. 
He seemed not to remember, or at least not to care, how 
the statement of the fact was going to make him ap- 
pear. One exception to this rule is on record ; it was 
about his duel with General Shields. This duel was 
one of that numerous class of duels that did not happen ; 
it only went so far as the sending of a challenge by the 
hot-blooded Irishman and its acceptance by Mr. Lin- 
coln, who took the responsibility rather than allow the 
authorship of certain satirical verses to be charged to 
the real writer, a young lady, afterward Mrs. Lincoln. 
Mr. Lincoln chose broadswords as the weapons, because 
his arms were long, and he reckoned he could keep 
Shields off; but friends interposed on the ground, and 
a reconciliation was effected. Long afterward, at Wash- 
ington, during the February before his death, a distin- 



/ 

LINCOLN. 79 

guishcd army officer, being at the White House, asked 
Mr. Lincoln in conversation, " Is it true, Mr. President, 
as I have heard, that you once went out to fight a duel 
for the sake of the lady by your sid<j-?" The President's 
face flushed, and he replied with a good deal of warmth, 
"I do not deny it; but if you desire my friendship you 
will never mention the circumstance again." 

But Mr. Lincoln's total indifference — whether natural, 
or acquired, or both — to the defects of his homely per- 
son, was a more characteristia illustration of his general 
manner as to himself; he joked and told stories about 
himself exactly as he did about anybody else. When 
all ready for a state dinner, he held up his hands, all 
** in pimlico" with white kids, and said with a laugh, 
" There's one of my Illinois friends who never sees my 
hands in that predicament without being reminded of 
canvassed hams !" He used to tell the following story, 
and to enjoy it, too: "In the days Avhen I used to be 
on the circuit, I was once accosted in the cars by a 
stranger, who said, * Excuse me, sir, but I have an 
article in my possession which belongs to you.' ' How 
is that ?' I asked, considerably astonished. The stranger 
took a jack-knife from his pocket. * This knife,' he said, 
' was placed in my hands some years ago, with the in- 
junction that I was to keep it until I found a man 
uglier than myself. I have carried it from that time 
to this. Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you 
are fairly entitled to the property.' " 

It was with genuine fun and enjoyment that when 
Mr. Carpenter Was first introduced to him, Mr. Lincoln 
teased him with the sudden question, "Do you think 
you can make a handsome picture of me ^'* 



80 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

When a foreign minister is presented to the Presi- 
dent, a speech is usually prepared for the President 
to make, by the person in charge of foreign relations, 
i. e., the Secretary of State. One day a green clerk 
was sent over with such a speech, and finding several 
public men with Mr. Lincoln, he came close up and 
said softly, as one does who wants to cover up the ig- 
norance of another, " The Secretary has sent the speech 
you are to make to-day to the Swiss minister." But 
the President answered in a loud tone, to the horror of 
the poor clerk, " Oh, this is a speech Mr. Seward has 
Avritten for me, is it*^ I guess I will try it before these 
gentlemen, and see how it goes !" So he read it out 
with comical tones, and observed slyly at the end, 
" There ! I like that. It has the merit of originality !" 

When Mr. Chase withdrew from the canvass of 1864, 
a good deal of public interest Avas excited by an edi- 
torial statement in the New York Independent^ that 
Mr. Chase wrote the concluding paragraph of the 
Proclamation. A friend who thought that perhaps Mr. 
Chase had had the bad taste to set the story afloat, 
went to see the President about if. " Oh," Mr. Lincoln 
said, " Mr. Chase had nothing to do with it. I think I 
mentioned the circumstance to Mr. Tilton myself" 
He had taken the best sentence he knew of to end the 
Proclamation with, adding two or three words, and was 
simply well pleased to have it credited to its author. 

He never seemed to have any idea that his being 
President made it necessary for him to treat others 
differently, or to be treated differently by them, except 
so far as business or public interests made it necessary. 
When a poor man came to him in the grounds of the 



LINCOLN. 81 

White House with a trouble to be remedied, he bor- 
rowed card and pencil of by-standers, sat down on the 
stone coping of the next fence and wrote the order 
necessary to help the applicant. Some who stood by- 
smiled at the informality of the attitude; his mind 
was simply bent on doing the right thing in the quick- 
est way. This unceremoniousness of his was well exem- 
plified in his reply to Lord Lyons, the bachelor English 
minister, at the state audience where the British noble- 
man announced the marriage of the Prince of Wales. 
Any one whatever of the other sixteen Presidents of 
the United States would have uttered a formal series 
of congratulations ; it is not improbable that Mr. Lin- 
coln had one, with what he once jocularly called " some 
of Seward's poetry^'' in it, neatly drafted by the Secre- 
tary, all ready in his coat-tail pocket at the time. But 
the President replied, as friendly man toman, "Lord 
Lyons, go thou and do likewise !" 

Mr. Raymond well states this curious want of any 
sense of official importance in Mr. Lincoln. He says, 
" It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find another 
man who would not, upon a sudden transfer from the ob- 
scurity of private life in a country town to the dignities 
and duties of the Presidency, feel it incumbent upon 
him to assume something of the manner and tone be- 
fitting that position. Mr. Lincoln never seemed to be 
aware that his place or his business were essentially 
different from those in which he had always been en- 
gaged. He brought to every question — the loftiest and 
most imposing — the same patient inquiry into details, 
the same eager longing to know and to do exactly 
what was just and right, and the same working-day, 
6 



82 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

plodding, laborious devotion, which characterized his 
management of a client's case at his law office in 
Springfield." 

FOEESIGHT. 

Remarkable care and thoughtful guardedness of 
language are striking features in Mr. Lincoln's state 
papers ; their assertions and provisions were prepared 
with successful caution against any unnecessary colli- 
sion with future events. Mr. Lincoln's greatest exhi- 
bition of this quality, however, was displayed in his 
early, clear, and positive understanding of the true scope 
and bearings of the political struggle which ended in 
the rebellion, both as a national matter and as restricted 
to Illinois. His speech at Springfield, in June, 1858, 
on accepting the nomination to the United States 
Senate in opposition to Mr. Douglas, was a remarkable 
instance of political foresight and intrepid plain speak- 
ing. This was the speech in which he avowed, " I believe 
this government can not endure permanently half slave 
and half free," and showed how Mr. Douglas and his 
party were steadily advancing toward legalizing slavery 
in all States of the Union. The bold avowals of this 
speech, like the great Proclamation which answered 
and decided its suggestions four years after, was delib- 
erately prepared without consultation with any of his 
friends, and was only shown to his law partner, Mr. 
Herndon, just before the hour of delivery; and it a 
good deal startled and a little frightened many of the 
speaker's friends by stating then the views and doc- 
trines Avhich all patriots came swiftly up to, a couple of 
years later. 



LINCOLN. 83 

In a smaller matter, in this same campaign, Mr. Lin- 
coln showed equal shrewdness and justness of insight. 
In the " seven debates" of that senatorial contest 
between Lincoln and Douglas, the latter had amused 
himself with a series of questions intended to plant 
Mr. Lincoln by means of his own answers upon an un- 
popular anti-slavery platform. By the answers, how- 
ever, Mr. Lincoln told the truth and avowed his true 
position, without becoming unpopular ; for the fact is, 
that in that controversy Mr. Douglas totally failed to 
discern the signs of the times ; he did not see at all 
how the North was abolitionizing itself by a perfectly 
natural reaction against the aggressive measures of the 
South. After answering Mr. Douglas' questions, Mr. 
Lincoln squared the account by proposing some in his 
turn, which were so framed that Judge Douglas Avas 
forced to answer them in such a manner as to show tliat 
his own " popular sovereignty" doctrine would upset 
the effect of the Dred Scott decision in the Territories. 
The question was this : " Can the people of a United 
States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish 
of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery 
from its limits prior to the formation of a State Consti- 
tution ?" When Mr. Lincoln's friends found what he 
Avas going to ask, they begged him to refrain ; " for," 
they said, " he will show that his doctrine of " squatter 
sovereignty" will nullify the Dred Scott decision, Avill 
thus satisfy ^^ublic opinion on that point, and Avill be . 
chosen senator." " That may be," said Mr. Lincoln ; 
*' but if he takes that shoot he never can be President." 
" But," they rejoined, " that is not your look-out. You 
are after the senatorship." " No, gentlemen," was the 



84 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

reply, " I am killing larger game. The battle of 1860 
is worth a hundred of this." The point is perfectly 
clear now : if Douglas' answer should assert the power 
of the Dred Scott decision to establish slavery in ter- 
ritories, hrs Presidential vote in the North was gone ; 
if he denied it, or even showed how to dodge it by 
means of " squatter sovereignty," the vote in the South 
was gone — or at least fatally weakened ; and this last 
is exactly what happened. It is all clear now ; but it 
required very clear sight and very strong faith to see 
it so plainly and act upon it so decisively two years in 
advance. 

MELANCHOLY. 

Mr. Lincoln's strong enjoyment of fun and humor 
did not prevent his character from being distinctly 
marked with a deep vein of melancholy, a tendency to 
Avhich is not unusual in persons of his physical charac- 
teristics. All his biographers agree upon this natural 
tendency ; and the dreadful responsibility and exhaust- 
ing labor of the war aggravated it. The risk of assas- 
sination does not seem to have troubled him at all, and 
yet a steady presentiment appears to have gradually 
settled upon him that he should not survive the war. 
" Whichever way it ends," he said to Mrs. Stowe, " I 
have the impression that I shall not last long after it is 
over." To another friend he said : " I feel a presenti- 
ment that I shall not outlast the rebellion. "When it is 
over, my work will be done." Indeed, he is said to 
have expressed the same expectation to Mr. Lovejoy, 
and to other of his friends. But he was sad, even with- 
out this dim cloud of death hanging half visibly over 
him. One morning, after receiving some bad news, 



LINCOLN. 85 

Mr. Lincoln met Mr. Colfax, and told him, adding that 
he had neither slept nor breakfasted, and exclaim- 
ed, "How willingly would I exchange places to-day 
with the soldier who sleeps on the ground in the Army 
of the Potomac !'* This occasional despondency was 
like the similar feelings that more than once overpow- 
ered General Washington, and the similarity even runs 
into expressions. Almost exactly the same thought 
was expressed by Washington in the dark days of the 
Revolution, when he said to a friend, " Such is my sit- 
uation, that if 1 were to wish the bitterest curse to an 
enemy this side of the grave, I should put him in my 
stead with my feelings." 

When on one occasion Mr. Lincoln was most strenu- 
ously begged by an energetic lady for a soldiers' hospital 
in her own State, at the North, she enforced her argu- 
ments by saying, " If you will grant my petition, you 
will be glad as long as you live." In answer, the 
lady says, *' The President bowed his head, and with a 
look of sadness which it is impossible for language to 
describe, said, ^ I shall never he glad any more.'''''' In 
reply, she urged that of all men he would have most 
reason to be glad ; but he answered, "I know, I know" — 
and he pressed his hand on his side — " but the springs 
of life are wearing away, and I shall not last." 

Mr. Carpenter repeatedly speaks of the sadness of 
Mr. Lincoln's face. " In repose," he remarks, " it was 
the saddest face I ever knew. There were days when I 
could scarcely look into it without crying." And the 
same trait is shown by his literary preferences on the 
serious side. Shakspeare, whose wonderful union of 
sadness and mirth was so much like Mr. Lincoln's own. 



86 THE PICTTJEE AND THE MEN. 

was liis favorite author ; and Hamlet, the most thought- 
fully melancholy of tragedies, had for him a peculiar 
charm. The poem, " Oh, why should the spirit of mor- 
tal be proud ?" so famous as a favorite composition of 
his, and so widely believed to have been written by 
him, is a contemplation of the shortness and vanity of 
life. He once repeated to Mr. Carpenter these lines 
from Holmes' "Last Leaf," as "inexpressibly touching:" 

" The mossy marbles rest 
On the lips that lie has pressed 

In their bloom ; 
And the names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 
On the tomb." 

And he added, " For pure pathos, in my judgment, 
there is nothing finer than those six lines in the En^ 
glish language." Here again it is observable that the 
author, who suited him so well, is remarkable for that 
same union of fun and sadness. 

RELIGION. 

Mr. Lincoln had not a natural tendency toward forms 
or formality in religion any more than in composing a 
state paper, answering an announcement of the mar- 
riage of a prince, or conducting a conversation. But 
as he was naturally a most thorough realist or believer 
in the substance and actual facts of things, so was he 
a believer in the Christian religion, and a doer, to the 
best of his ability, of the commands thereof He con- 
sidered himself a Christian, too. But a natural secre- 
tiveness or disinclination to talk about what . interested 
him most profoundly, kept him almost always silent on 



LINCOLN. 87 

such topics ; and this habit was probably strengthened 
by his living so much among rough people, and among 
sharp lawyers and busy politicians. He one day asked 
a pious woman to describe a true Christian experience. 
She answered, in substance, that it is a conviction of 
one's own sinfulness and weakness, and of one's per- 
sonal need of the support of the Saviour ; the feeling 
of the need of Divine help and consequent seeking the 
aid of the Holy Spirit for strength and guidance. The 
President's reply was a very distinct avowal of his 
Christian belief. He said : " If what you have told me 
is really a correct view of this great subject, I think I 
can say with sincerity that I hope I am a Christian. I 
lived until my boy Willie died without realizing fully 
these things. That blow overAvhelraed me. It showed 
me my weakness as I had never felt it before ; and if I 
can take what you have stated as a test, I think I can 
safely say that I know something of that change of 
which you speak ; and I will further add, that it has 
been my intention for some time, at a suitable oppor- 
tunity, to make a public religious confession." On an- 
other occasion, when some person had referred to the 
many silent and unknown prayers daily put up for him, 
he said, after referring to the strength which he had 
derived from believing that such prayers were made — 
and speaking with special deliberation and solemnity — 
"I should be the most presumptuous blockhead upon 
this footstool, if I for one day thought that I could 
discharge the duties which have come upon me since 
I came into this place, without the aid and enlight- 
enment of One who is stronger and wiser than all 
others." 



$8 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

Mr. Lincoln's profound sense of the nearness and 
efficient action of God was impressively shown in the 
manner of his final resolution to proclaim Emancipa- 
tion, as announced at the Cabinet meeting where it was 
resolved on. He introduced the subject at that meet- 
ing by saying: "The time for the announcement of 
the Emancipation policy can no longer be delayed. 
Public sentiment, I think, will sustain it — many of my 
warmest friends and supporters demand it ;" then in a 
lower tone, as if speaking to himself, " and I have 
promised my God that I would do it^ Secretary 
Chase, w^ho was nearest to him, was the only one who 
heard these last words at all, and he asked the Presi- 
dent if he had correctly understood him. Mr. Lincoln 
replied: " I made a solemn vow before God, that if Gen- 
eral Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would 
crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the 
slaves.'' The President's daily observance of family 
devotions w^as just as sincere as his sanctioning a great 
public act by a vow to God. The captain of his body- 
guard, Captain Mix, a gentleman of culture and intelli- 
gence, said : " Many times have I listened to our most 
eminent preachers, but never with the same feelings of 
awe and reverence as when our Christian President, 
his arm around his son, with his deep earnest tone, each 
morning read a chapter from the Bible." The depth of 
his belief in the Christian God appears from his circu- 
lar of November 16, 1862, to the army, against Sab- 
bath-breaking ; in which he said, ^' The discipline and 
character of the national forces should not suffer, nor 
the cause they defend he inijKriled^ by the profanation 
of the day, or of the name of the Most High," 



LINCOLN. 8d 

MEMORY. 

Mr. Lincoln had the same sort of memory for faces 
and names which is said to exist by liereditary descent 
and centuries of practice in the European royal families. 
While President, some one mentioned to him a Mr. 

(J- ; " I have known him now for almost thirty years," 

was the reply. "My first board bill in Springfield 

began oti the 15th of April, 1837, and C came 

along about strawberry time." A gentleman on shak- 
ing hands with him one day, said, "I presume, Mr. 
President, that you have forgotten me ?" " No," was 
the answer ; " your name is Flood. I saw you last, twelve 

years ago, at ," and he named the place and the 

occasion. His memory for miscellaneous and literary 
matter was almost as remarkable. When a clerk in 
Offutt's grocery, ho is said to have been able to repeat 
the whole of Burns, and to have been hard at work in 
securing Shakspeare in the same repository. AYliile 
President, he repeated on a casual occasion the soliloquy 
in Hamlet, and with remarkable justness of conception 
and force of expression. On another occasion he re- 
peated in like manner the opening soliloquy of Richard 
the Third, and gave it an interpretation and significance 
quite different from the usual one, and very appropriate 
and striking. He even remembered, sometimes, the 
driest statistics. At receiving a deputation of bankers 
from several parts of the country, he observed to one 
of them : " Your district did not give me so strong a 
vote at the last election as in 1866." The banker 
thought the President was in error, and that the fact 
was the other way. " No," said Mr. Lincoln, " you fell 
off about six hundred votes ;" and taking from a shelf, 



90 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

the official canvasses of the two elections, he turned to 
the name of the district and showed that it was as he 
sa-id. Only a very powerful memory, moreover, could 
have retained and furnished that wonderful river of 
stories which llowcd throuG:h all Mr. Lincoln's talk- 



ABSENCE OF MIND. 

Mr. Lincoln was frequently so absorbed in solicitous 
thought, intense mental effort, or, in the years of his 
Presidency, painful re very or sorrowful reflection, as to 
become quite unconscious of his surroundings. This 
tendency was aided by his natural freedom from self- 
consciousness. When he lived at New Salem he used 
so often to pass his most intimate friends in the street 
without noticing them, that people reckoned him crazy. 
He often sat down • at his own table without realizing 
the place or the company, and ate mechanically. He 
cared for eating, indeed, always, about as little as the 
Duke of "Wellington, and was far better pleased to 
"browse 'round," as he called it one day at Wasliington, 
than to sit out elaborate state dinners. Once, during one 
of the official hand-shaking j^erformances at Washing- 
ton, an intimate acquaintance of the President shook 
hands, spoke, and was saluted in the usual form, but 
saw that he was not recognized at all, and so he stopjied 
short a moment and spoke again. This waked up the 
President, who now recognized his friend, and seizing 
his hand, shook it heartily, exclaiming, " How do you 
do ? How do you do ? Excuse me for not noticing 
you. I was thinking of a man down South." This 
" man down South" was General Sherman, who, with 



LINCOLN. 91 

several other " men," was at that moment making a 
promenade from Atlanta to the sea. 

HUMOR. 

Decidedly the most prominent characteristic of Mr. 
Lincoln's mind was his extreme love for jokes, wit, 
humor, and fun, especially for "stories," and he is 
famous for the immense supply of the latter with 
which he used on all occasions to illuminate his argu- 
ments, point his satire, ornament the thread of conver- 
sation, or occupy any corner or hint on which a simil- 
itude or an illustration could hang. In giving a general 
view of his character, a few of his stories and sayings, 
and of anecdotes that illustrate his love of mirthful 
matter, must he given. To repeat all of them would 
fill a large book, and has in fact already filled much 
larger books than the whole of this one. 

As early as in the Black Hawk war, in 1832, Mr. 
Lincoln's popularity with the soldiers of his company 
and with the other troops of tlie command was attrib- 
uted to his " great physical strength, his excellent 
care of the men in his command, his never-failing good- 
nature, and his ability to tell more stories and better 
ones than any man in the service. This strong natural 
talent was most powerfully developed during Mr. 
Lincoln's long and active experience among the lawyers 
and politicians of Illinois ; and his Presidential career 
afforded a thick-coming series of occasions admitting of 
illustration by all possible sorts of parables, sayings, 
and comparisons, of which occasions Mr. Lincoln took 
full advantage. We all remember how frequently this 
trait was made tlie mark for all manner of attacks. 



92 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

grave, satirical, and scumlous. But so far from origin- 
ating in light-mindedness, frivolity, or badness of heart, 
the fact is that the overburdened and heart-worn Presi- 
dent used the momentary relief that such things gave 
him as a medicine, a rest, as he might have used sleep, 
could he have always commanded it. Sleep often re- 
fused to come ; but there is no account of Mr. Lincoln's 
having failed to have a story whenever he wanted it. 
His old friend Mr. Arnold understood this, and said 
one day, on hearing Mr. Lincoln's hearty laugh : " That 
laugh has been the President's life-preserver." Mr. 
Ashley, an Ohio Congressman, did not understand the 
case so well one morning, when he called on Mr. Lin- 
coln just after one of the disasters of the summer of 
1862. The President began to tell some funny story, 
when Mr. Ashley, j^rovoked, rose up, saying, "Mr. Presi- 
dent, I did not come here this morning to hear stories. 
It is too serious a time." Without irritation, Mr. Lin- 
coln at once answered, with entire seriousness ; " Ash- 
ley, sit down. I respect you as an earnest, sincere 
man. You can not be more anxious than I have been 
constantly since the beginning of the war ; and I say 
to you now, that were it not for this occasional vent, I 
should die,'''* 

He always kept in his desk the latest humorous book 
of the day, and from time to time, when fatigued or 
troubled beyond endurance, he would take out his book 
and read a chapter or two, with as much relief — and of 
a great deal better kind — as a weary toper could find 
in his glass of bitters. One evening, when he was 
utterly worn out with office-seekers over and above his 
usual heavy business, a delegation of public men came 



LINCOLN. 93 

in, having matters in charge which required much at- 
tention and the examination of many extensive docu- 
ments. So, as if to stimulate him for a special effort, 
the President took a dram — of fun. " Have you seen 
the Nasby Papers ?" he asked one of the party, at the 
same time shoving all the documents to one side. 
" No," was the reply ; " who is Nasby ?" IVIr. Lincoln 
said he was a "chap out in Ohio," writing in the 
papers with the signature of Petroleum V. Nasby ; and, 
he added, " I am going to write to Petroleum to come 
down here, and I intend to tell him that if he will com- 
municate his talent to me, I will swap places with him." 
So he took out the pamphlet collection of the Nasby 
Papers, and read a chapter. All enjoyed it ; and Mr. 
Lincoln, refreshed by his own enjoyment of it, and by 
theirs, too, put away the book, and instantly coming 
back to business and seriousness, took up the matter in 
hand with prompt earnestness. 

Dr. Holland says that when the President called the 
Cabinet together to hear his Emancipation Proclama- 
tion, he began first of all by reading a whole chapter 
from " Artemus Ward, his Book," laughing so wholly 
and heartily at Artemus' nonsense that some of those 
present Avere much pained. If they were so, it was 
merely from not understanding Mr. Lincoln ; for as- 
suredly he was as earnest as any of them in the matter 
of the Great Proclamation itself. Still, few men could 
possibly understand that singular intimate mingling of 
humor and seriousness without injury by either to the 
other, which was a feature of Mr. Lincoln's mind, un- 
less they jiossessed in some measure the same combina- 
tion of traits. But this intermingling was very com- 



94 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

plete ; it was promoted by Mr. Lincoln's want of what 
phrenology calls " self-esteem," and by his rough West- 
ern life among men who are no respecters of persons ; 
and it sometimes occasioned rather startling and heter- 
ogeneous assortments of ideas in Mr, Lincoln's talk as 
to both men and things. When Mr. Cameron left tlie 
Cabinet, certain earnest persons wanted others to leave 
too, and urged Mr. Lincoln to have it so. In reply he 
told them how Joe Wilson found that skunks were de- 
stroying his chickens, and, getting excited, went out one 
night and shot one^ but it was " eleven weeks before 
he got over killing»that one," and accordingly gave up 
the hunt for the rest. But Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Cam- 
eron were very good friends, and he did not at all 
mean that he thought Mr. Cameron a skunk who ought 
to be shot, or the rest of the Cabinet skunks that it 
was unsafe to hunt. Exactly like this in style was the 
story with which he answered some gentlemen who 
asked what he would do with Jeff. Davis ? He told 
them of a boy who bought a " coon" and led him about 
with a rope, until the tormenting creature had scratched 
half his clothes off and tired him completely out. When 
a man found him sitting down, miserable and unhappy, 
and asked him, " Why don't you get rid of your coon ?" 
the boy answered, " Hush ! don't you see he's gnawing 
his rope off? I'm going to let him do it, and then I'll 
go home and tell the folks he got away from me!" 
When Messrs. Wade and Davis published their violent 
manifesto against him, he said it was not worth fretting 
about, and told the story of the old man whose son 
warned him not to eat the cheese, for it was full of 
wrigglers. " Let 'cm wriggle, my son," said the old 



LINCOLN. 95 

gentleman, chewing away, " I kin stand it if they kin !" 
When he was urged in the beginning of the war to 
send a great fleet down South to draw off the rebels 
from before Washington, he said it was like the man's 
prescription to relieve the girl at New Salem who had 
a singing in her head. This was to put a plaster of 
psalm tunes on her feet and draw the singing down. 
When he was told that " firing had been heard in the 
direction of Knoxville," he said he was glad of it, and 
when some one intimated that it was rather singular to 
be glad of what intimated that Burn side w^as in danger, 
he said that he Avas like Mistress Sallie Ward, an old 
neighbor of his, with a good many cliildren. When 
one of her young folks was heard crying, off in some 
out-of-the-way place, she would remark, " There's one 
of my children that isn't dead yet !" The parable of 
the man who declined to swap horses Avhile swimming 
a river, which he used to illustrate the risks of taking 
another candidate than himself in 1864, is known to 
everybody. Of the same sort was his answer to the 
inquiry which an earnest clerical friend made in the first 
days of his administration, what his policy was going to 
be on slavery. " Once," said he, " a young Methodist 
preacher was worrying in the presence of old Father 
B., lest a freshet in Fox River should prevent him from 
filling some of his appointments. Father B. checked 
him with his gravest manner. ' Young man,' said the 
old minister, * I have always made it a rule in my life 
not to cross Fox River until I got to it.' And I am 
not going to worry myself about the slavery question 
until I get to it." 

The same perfect fusion of joke and earaest, meta- 



&6 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

phoric illustration and weighty truth, was shown in in- 
numerable repartees, remarks, and comments on all sorts 
of occasions, about himself, the war, politics, anything 
that came up. A famous definition of eloquence is, 
"Logic, red hot." Mr. Lincoln's idea of convincing 
was, " Truth, made f«nny." It was almost always by 
similitudes, in one form or another, that he enforced 
his meaning, or else by quaint and expressive meta- 
phors from rustic life ; more rarely in the form of wit. 
An instance of the latter is his reply to the clergyman 
who " hoped the Lord was on our side." " I am not 
concerned about that," was Mr. Lincoln's answer, " for 
I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. 
But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and 
this nation should be on the Lord's side." This was a 
good specimen of grave and lofty wit, where a most 
weighty truth is conveyed in a keen and sharply put 
antithesis. There was, again, a somewhat unusually 
satirical edge in his short answer to an anti-slavery delr 
egation which once urged upon him the instant adop- 
tion of the emancipation policy, and whose chairman, 
the well-known racy preacher. Rev. Dr. George B. 
Cheever, spiced his arguments, after his manner, with 
many Old Testament quotations. Mr. Lincoln heard it 
all through, meditated a moment, drew a long breath, 
and observed, " Well, gentlemen, it is not often that 
one is favored with a delegation direct from the Al- 
mighty !" 

When somebody pressed him for a pass to go through 
the Union lines to Richmond, he said " it was useless ; 
that he had already given passes to four hundred thou- 
sand men to go there, and not one had got there unless 



LINCOLN. 97 

he was carried." A civilian, so ignorant of military af- 
fairs as not even to know what appointment he wanted, 
sent in a written request to be made " general." The 
President indorsed the paper, by way of explanation 
and joke together, " J[/a;or-general, I reckon. A. Lin- 
coln." He called the Presidency of the United States 
" a scrape ;" for when somebody sent him a fine new 
hat just after he was elected, he tried it on, and then 
turning to Mrs. Lincoln said^ with a quizzical manner, 
" Well, wife, there is one thing likely to come out of 
this scrape, anyhow : we are going to have some new 
clothes !" There was a decidedly comic element in his 
sending Yallandigham over among the rebels ; it made 
the Ohio " sympathizer" look ridiculous before the 
whole United States, and killed him completely, in a 
political sense ; the punishment was so funny that it 
could not be whined over as a persecution. Of the 
same kind was the reasoning indorsed on the decision 
in the case of Franklin W. Smith ; a document which 
the Navy Department icill not allow to he copied. But 
it was very nearly thus : Smith, it must be premised, 
had been most vindictively pursued by a " military 
court," whose whole finding Mr. Lincoln annulled in 
the following quaintly reasoned indorsement : 

" Wliereas, Franklin W. Smith had transactions with the 
Navy Department, to the amount of one million and a quarts: 
of a million of dollars ; and whereas^ he had a chance to steal 
a quarter of a million, and was only charged with stealing 
twenty-two hundred dollars, and the question now is about his 
stealing a hundred— therefore I don't believe he stole anything 
at all. Therefore the record and findings are disapproved, de- 
clared null and void, and tiie defendants are fully discharged." 

Having completed his second inaugural — which the 



98 THE riCTUKE AND THE MEN. 

London Spectator called " the noblest political docu- 
ment known to history"— he brought it, on tlie Sunday 
evening before the re-inauguration, into his office, where 
several personal friends were sitting, and thus proclaim- 
ed its existence, and as much as he chose of its charac- 
ter: "Lots of w^isdom, I suspect, in that document. 
It is what will be called my second inaugural, contain- 
ing about six hundred words." He always had a joke 
for any actual or real misadventure to himself. When 
beaten for United States senator, in Illinois, he was 
asked how he felt about it, and replied that he " felt 
like the boy who had stubbed his toe — too bad to laugh 
and too big to cry." When some one brought him bad 
news as to the prospect for liis re-election, he said, 
"Well, I can not run the political machine — I have 
enough on my hands without that. It is the people's 
business — the election is in their hands. If they turn 
their backs to the fire and get scorched in the rear, 
they'll find they've got to sit on the blister P"* A judge 
who had in vain asked General Halleck, and then Sec- 
retary Stanton, for a pass to go to Richmond, applied 
to the President. "Have you asked- Halleck ?" said 
Mr. Lincoln, " Yes, and met with a flat refusal." " Then 
you must see Stanton." "I have," said the Judge, 
" and with the same result." " Well, then," said Mr. 
Btncoln, smiling, "I can do nothing; for you must 
know, I have very little influence xoith this administror 
tion /" He remarked with a very quiet but very satir- 
ical quaintness one day, that if McClellan did not Avant 
the ai-my for anything, he " would like to borrow it." 
He called his going to his work in the morning " open- 
ing shop." Speaking to Mr. Raymond in the begin- 



LINCOLN. 99 

ninor of his term of the absurd situation he found him- 
self in, with the rebellion upon him, and the horrible 
mob of office-holders that besets every new President 
howling and whining about him, and occupying so 
much of his time, he said, " I am like a man so busy 
letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop 
to put out the fire at the other end." Having signed 
a great pile of commissions, he said to Mr. Carpenter, 
" There, I've got that job hushed ouV These instan- 
ces— ^a few only out of a whole life-full — are how^ever 
enough to show how completely Mr. Lincoln's ways of 
thought and speech were homely, direct, metaphorical, 
and humorous or witty. 

LANGUAGE — REASONING ORATORY. 

Mr. Lincoln was not a great orator, but he was a 
very convincing public reasoner, and his language, 
whether written or spoken — for they were exactly 
alike — as well as his modes of reasoning, had some no- 
ticeable peculiarities. Of these, the chief is, the clear- 
ness and force with which the thought is conveyed, 
notwithstanding what may seem awkward or undigni- 
fied forms of expression. There is a curious contrast, 
which will strongly illustrate this point, between two 
passages conveying precisely the same idea ; with one 
of which Daniel Webster opened his magnificent reply 
to Hayne, and the other is the beginning of Mr. Lin- 
coln's great speech at Springfield, on opening ■ the sen- 
atorial campaign against Douglas. The great Massa- 
chusetts orator began thus ; 

" When the mariner has been tossed for many days, in thick 
weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself 



100 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

of the lii*st pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to 
take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have 
driven him from his true course. Let us imitate that prudence, 
and before we float farther, refer to the point from which wc 
departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where vrc 
now are." 

In his speech at Springfield, a singularly clear, terse, 
profound, and comprehensive statement of the slavery 
and anti-slavery controversy, Mr. Lincoln covers exact- 
ly the same ground, as follows : 

" If we could first know where wc axe, and whither we are 
tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it." 

Mr. Webster here used eighty-tAVO w'ords, of which 
twenty, almost a quarter, have more than one syllable. 
Mr. Lincoln used twenty-five words, of w^hich three, or 
less than one eighth, have more than one syllable. 
This may seem a petty method of comparing orators ; 
but it reveals a great secret of directness, clearness, 
simplicity, and force in style — it goes far to explain 
how Mr. Lincoln convinced an audience. Of the same 
condensed sort w^as a little " sermon" — a very compre- 
hensive code for living a good life, which Mr. Lincoln 
is said to have often repeated to his boys. It w^ould be 
a good discourse for every boy in the United States to 
commit to memory — and still better to live up to. 
Thus it ran : 

** Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, don't swear, don't 
gamble, don't lie, don't cheat. Love your fellow-men and love 
God. Love truth, love virtue, and be happy." 

Almost as short w^as his first public political speech, 
in 1832, at oftering himself for the Illinois Legislature. 



LINCOLN. 101 

His opponent bad set forth his views at great length, 
and Mr. Lincoln, when his turn came, spoke thus : 

" Gentlemen, fellow-citizens : I presume you know who I am — 
I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many 
fncnds to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics 
can be briefly stated. I am in favor of a national bank. I am 
in favor of the internal imjirovement system, and a high pro- 
tective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. 
If elected, I shall be thankful. If not, it will be all the same." 

As a reasoner to juries, Mr. Lincoln was very suc- 
cessful. One great cause of this, as has been shown, 
was the well-known fact that what he argued heartily 
he believed in heartily. Thus his client had, besides 
the justice of his cause, the whole weight of the lawyer's 
j)ersonal« character — an advantage of vast importance, 
but which few lawyers know or care about. But all 
this was materially helped by the strenuous directness 
with which Mr. Lincoln labored straight at the truth — 
the facts — and the utter sincerity with which, when he 
had grasped them himself, he strove to communicate 
them to the jury in the plainest, simplest, clearest Avay. 
To be sure, he told stories and used liumorous turns of 
expression. But these were so used as to be clear 
lights flung direct upon the point in hand — not, as with 
rhetoricians, mere fireworks to dazzle and confuse. 
After Mr. Lincoln's death, memorial proceedings of the 
usual kind were had in the courts of Illinois. Ex- Judge 
Caton, in the Supreme Court at Ottawa, in speaking to 
the resolutions from the bar, observed, " Mr. Lincoln 
knew the relations of things, and hence his deductions 
were rarely wrong from any given state of facts. So 
he applied the principles of law to the transactions of 



102 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

men with great clearness and precision. He was a 
close reasoner. He reasoned by analogy, and enforced 
his views by apt illustrations." Judge Breese, on the 
same occasion, said, " I have for a quarter of a century 
regarded Mr. Lincoln as the finest lawyer I ever knew," 
Judge Drummond, of Chicago, said, " He was one of the 
ablest lawyers I liave ever known." Long before he 
became known in politics, he was pointed out to a 
stranger by a citizen of Springfield as " Abe Lincoln, 
the first lawyer of Illinois." 

His success before popular audiences was based on 
the same qualities as his success with juries. Both de- 
pended upon his complete mental sympathy with aver- 
age men, and his great power of stating and illustrat- 
ing facts upon the mental level of average men — that 
is, plainly, directly, forcibly, and humorously. An 
account, by the Rev. J. B. Gulliver, of a conversation 
with Mr. Lincoln, about his sj)eech at Norwich, Conn., 
during his visit at the East just after the Seven 
Debates with Douglas, gives so just and striking a 
portraiture of Mr. Lincoln's speaking and modes of 
thought, that it is transcribed here. It is from the 
New York Independent of Sept. 1, 1864. Mr. Gulliver, 
meeting Mr. Lincoln in the cars the day afler the 
speech, said, during the conversation, that it was " one 
of the most extraordinary speeches lie ever heard." 

** As we entered tlie cars [continues Mr. Gulliver], lie beck- 
oned me to take a seat with him, and said, in a most agree- 
ably frank way, 'Were you sincere in what you said about 
my speech just now?' 'I meant eveiy word of it, Mr. Lin- 
coln. Why, an old dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, who sat near 
me, applauded you repeatedly; and, when rallied upon his 
conversion to sound principles, answered, '* I don't believe a 



LINCOLN. 103 

"word he says, but I can't help clapping him, he is so jjatT 
That I call the triumph of oratory — 

"When 3^ou convince a man against his will, 
Though he ia of the same opinion still." 

Indeed, sir, I learned more of the art of public speaking last 
evening than I could from a Avhole course of lectures on Rhe- 
toric' 

" * Ah ! that reminds me,' said he, ' of a most extraordinary 
circumstance which occurred in New Haven the other day. 
They told me that the Professor of Rhetoric in Yale College — 
a very learned man, isn't he ?' 

" * Yes, sir, and a fine critic, too.' 

" ' Well, I suppose so ; he ought to be, at any rate — they told 
me that he came to hear me, and took notes of my speech, and 
gave a lecture on it to his class the next day ; and, not satisfied 
with that, he followed me up to Meriden the next evening, and 
heard me again for the same purpose. Now, if this is so, it is 
to my mind very extraordinary. I have been sufficiently aston- 
ished at my success in the West. It has been most unexpected. 
But I had no thought of any marked success at the East, and 
least of all that I should draw out such commendations from 
literary and learned men. Now,' he continued, * I should like 
veiy much to know what it was in my speech you thought so 
remarkable, and what you suppose interested my friend the 
Professor so much.' 

" * The clearness of your statements, Mr. Lincoln ; the un- 
answerable style of your reasoning, and especially your illus- 
trations, which were romance and pathos, and fun and logic 
all welded together. That stoiy about the snakes, for example, 
which set the hands and feet of your Democratic hearers in 
such vigorous motion, was at once queer and comical, and 
tragic and argumentative. It broke through all the barriers 
of a man's previous opinions and prejudices at a crash, and 
blew up the very citadel of his false theories before he could 
know what had hurt him.' 

" ' Can you remember any other illustrations,' said he, * of 
this peculiarity of my style ?' 



104 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

*' I gave him others of the same sort, occupying some half 
hour in the critique, when he said : ' I am mucli obliged to you 
for this. I have been wishing for a long time to find some one 
who would make this analysis for me. It throws light on 
a subject which has been dark to me. I can understand 
very readily how such a power as you have ascribed to me will 
account for the effect which seems to be produced by my 
speeches. I hope you have not been too flattering in your 
estimate. Certainly, I have had a most wonderful success, for 
a man of my limited education.' " 

Perhaps the most characteristic of all Mr. Lincoln's 
peculiarities of reasoning was his habit of arguing 
against himself — against the view to "vvhich he was in- 
clined, which he desired, which he expected to adopt, 
and which he did in fact finally adopt. His widely- 
known saying, when urged by a deputation of clergy- 
men to proclaim emancipation, " I do not want to issue 
a document that the whole world w411 see must neces- 
sarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the 
comet !" was uttered more than a month after he had 
declared to the Cabinet his confirmed purpose to issue 
the Great Proclamation. "Wliile a lawyer, he used, in 
the words of Dr. Holland, to " study both sides (of his 
cases) w^ith equal thoroughness. It was in the days ol 
his legal practice his habit to argue against himself, 
and it always remained the habit of his life. He took 
special interest in the investigation of every point that 
could be made against him and his positions." Mr. 
Colfax, in his Chicago funeral oration upon Mr. Lincoln, 
thus described this trait : 

" When his judgment, which acted slowly, but which was 
almost as immovable as the eternal hills when settled, was 
grasping some subject of importance, the arguments against his 



LINCOLN. 105 

own desires seemed uppermost in his mind, and in conversing 
upon it, he would use those arguments, to see if they could be 
rebutted." 

After the same fashion, altliougli he was thought to 
hesitate a good while before he nominated to the place 
of Chief-Justice of the United States, vacant by Judge 
Taney's death, yet he said himself that " there never 
was a time during his Presidency when, in the event of 
the death of Judge Taney, he had not fully intended 
and expected to nominate Salmon P. Chase for Chief- 
Justice." 

ORIGINALITY. 

Mr. Lincoln's methods of thinking and ways of ex- 
pressing his thoughts were so completely his own that 
his mental operations gave an hnpression of lonesome- 
ness. The expedients he used, the thoughts that came 
into his mind, the phraseology in w^hich he communi- 
cated them, w^ere not only his own, but they w^ere so 
diflerent from what others would have thought of, that 
they surprise. This quality, indeed, had much to do 
Avith the impressiveness of his reasonings; an idea 
stated in a way that we never thought of before, is 
very hard to forget or to disprove. A curious illustra- 
tion of this ready and out-of-the-way but sufficient 
suggestiveness is the story of his getting his boat over 
a dam. The boat was water-logged, and he got the 
bow over the dam, and then bored a hole through tlie 
bottom and let the water out, to lighten her. Other 
men would have bailed her out. Xearly all the anec- 
dotes that have already been given to bring out other 
points in Mr. Lincoln's character, do in fact show also 
this same trait of originality. The punishment of Val- 



106 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

landigham— the " opening shop" — alpiost every act and 
word of the man, in fact, was of the same original, pecu- 
liar, and yet sufficient character. Nothing more strong. 
ly illustrates and proves this trait of originality than 
the fact that Mr. Lincoln said things that became pro- 
verbial. " If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," 
he wrote in a letter ; an expression which says, charac- 
teristically, in Mr. Lincoln's reasoning manner, what 
Wesley put more epigrammatically, but not more pow- 
erfully, when he said, " Slavery is the sum of all vil- 
lainies." His great speech at New York ended with 
the lofty thought: "It has been said of the world's 
history hitherto, that ' might makes right ;' it is for us 
and for our times to reverse the maxim, and to show 
that right makes might." His phrase " to swap horses 
while crossing the river," is even more widely current, 
and the very noble antithesis in the second inaugural — 
" With malice toward none, with charity for all," is 
not only j^roverbial but historical. 

EDUCATION. 

Mr. Lincoln, as has been mentioned, had but few 
months schooling in all. He never read a novel. 
He read newspapers, and indeed may be said to have 
studied them, for a great part of his life, although after 
he became President he hardly looked into any. He 
found that facts themselves were all he could attend 
to, without trying to see what editors thought of them. 
He began " Ivanhoe" once, but did not finish it. The 
class-books he studied most were neither grammar nor 
geography, but the Bible, Shakspeare, JEsop's Fables, 
and the Pilgrim's Prosrress. Of the former three he 



LINCOLN. 107 

could repeat considerable portions. And he read, also, 
the Life of Washington, the Life of Franklin, and the 
Life of Henry Clay. It would be very hard to choose 
seven better books for a young man to feed on. B«t 
Mr. Lincoln's real education was his life of strenuous 
mental labor, first in learning the principles applicable 
to his work, whatever that was, and secondly, in apply- 
ing those principles so as to do that work in the quick- 
est and most effective way. 

PRESIDENT. 

The merit of Mr. Lincoln's Presidency is, that he 
judged so well what the people of the United States 
willed, and when and how to do what they, willed. If 
he had able advisers, so much the greater his merit for 
knowing good advice when it was given to him and 
for following it. It is exactly the proper office of an 
American statesman and ruler as distinguished from a 
monarchical one, that he must see and do what the na- 
tion chooses, not what he himself chooses. For filling 
his office in this way, Mr. Lincoln was fitted by the 
same quality of mental sympathy with the average 
citizen, which enabled him to reason so convincingly 
before American audiences; and his natural kindness 
of heart and rectitude in action were no less corre-. 
sj^ondent to the character of the nation. He was con- 
scious of the necessity of thus acting, not as an auto- 
crat, but as an agent. Mr. Carpenter says, " Mr. Lin- 
coln liked to feel himself the attorney of the people, 
not their ruler. Speaking once of the probability of 
liis re-nomination, he said : * If the people think I have 
manasjed their case for them well enousjli to trust me 



lOS THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

to carry it on to the next term, I am sure I sliall be 
glad to take it.' " In conversing with Colonel — then 
Major — Halpine, who suggested a plan to relieve him 
from great part of the immense number of personal ap- 
plications and interviews that burdened him so heavily, 
he expressed more fully the same idea. He said, " For 
myself, I feel — though the tax on my time is heavy — 
that no hours of my day are better employed than 
those which thus bring me again within the direct con- 
tact and atmosphere of our whole people." * * * "I 
tell you. Major, that I call these receptions my ' public- 
opinion baths ;' for I have but little time to read the 
papers and gather public opinion that Avay ; and though 
they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the 
effect as a whole is renovating and invigorating to my 
perceptions of responsibility and duty." 

PEESOXAL APPEAEAXCE. 

The following description of 'Mr. Lincoln's person, 
from an address by his law partner, Mr. Ilerndon, is 
almost as original a piece of work as any of Mr. Lin- 
coln's own, and is a very graphic representation of the 
man: 

" He was about six feet four inches high, and when he left 
this city was fifty-one years old, having good health and no 
gray hairs, or but few, on his head. He was thin, wiry, sin- 
ewy, raw-boned ; thin through the breast to the back, and nar- 
row across the shoulders ; standing, he leaned forward — was 
what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclining to the consump- 
tive by build. His usual weight was one hundred and sixty 
pounds. His organization — rather his structure and functions 
— worked slowly. His blood had to run a long distance from 
his heart to the extremities of his frame, and his nerve-force 



LI^COLIT. 109 

liad to traTcl through dry ground a long distance before his 
muscles were obedient to his will. His structure was loose and 
leathery; his body was shrunk and shriveled, having dark 
skin, dark hair — looking woe-struck. The whole man, body 
and mind, worked slowly, creakingly, as if it needed oiling. 
Physically, he was a very powerful man, lifting with ease four 
hundred or six hundred pounds. His mind was like his body, 
and worked slowly but strongly. When he walked, he moved 
cautiously but firmly, his long arms and hands on them, hang- 
ing like giant's hands, swung down by his side. He walked 
with even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He 
put the whole foot flat down on the ground at once, not land- 
ing on the heel ; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not ris- 
ing from the toe, and hence he had no spring to his walk. He 
liad economy of fall and lift of foot, though he had no spring 
or apparent ease of motion in his tread. He walked undula- 
tory, up and down, catching and pocketing tire, weariness, and 
pain, all up and down his person, preventing them from locat- 
ing. The first opinion of a stranger, or a man who did not ob- 
serve closely, was that his walk implied shrewdness, cunning 
— a tricky man ; but his was the walk of caution and firmness. 
In sitting down on a common chair he was no taller than ordi- 
nary men. His legs and arms were, abnormally, unnaturally 
long, and in undue proportion to the balance of his body. It 
was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men. 

" Mr. Lincoln's head was long and tall from the base of the 
brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backward, his 
forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's, and, 
unlike Webster's, almost perpendicular. The size of his hat, 
measured at the hatter's block, was seven and an eighth, his 
head being, from ear to car, six and a half inches, and from the 
front to the back of the brain eight inches. Thus measured, 
it was not below the medium size. His forehead was narrow 
but high ; his hair was dark, almost black, and lay floating 
where his fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random. His 
cheek-bones were high, sharp, and prominent ; his eyebrows 
heavy and prominent ; his jaws were long, up-curved, and 
heavy ; his nose was large, long, and blunt, a little awiy toward 



110 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

the light eye ; his chin was long, sharp, and up-curved ; his 
eyebrows cropped out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill ; 
his face was long, sallow, and cadaverous, shrunk, shriveled, 
wrinkled, and dry, having here and there a hair on the sur- 
face ; his cheeks were leathery ; his cars were large, and ran 
out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly by 
heavy hats and partly by nature ; his lower lip was thick, hang- 
ing, and under-curved, while his chin reached for the lip up- 
curved ; his neck vras neat and trim, his head being well bal- 
anced on it ; there was the lone mole on the right cheek, and 
Adam's apple on his throat. 

" Thus stood, walked, acted, and looked Abraham Lincoln. 
He was not a pretty man by anj'^ means, nor was he an ugly 
one ; he vras a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-look- 
ing and plain-acting. He had no pomp, display, or dignity, 
so-called. He appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. 
He was a sad-looking man ; his melancholy dripped from him 
as he walked. His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and 
created a sympathy for him — one means of his great success. 
He was gloomy, abstracted, and joyous — rather humorous — ^by 
turns. I do not think he knew what real joy was for many 
years. 

" Mr. Lincoln sometimes walked our streets cheerily — good- 
humoredly, perhaps joyously — and then it was, on meeting a 
friend, he cried ' How d'y ?' clasping one of his friend's hands 
in both of his, giving a good hearty soul-welcome. Of a win- 
ter's morning, he might be seen stalking and stilting it toward 
the market-house, basket on arm, his old gray shawl wrapped 
around his neck, his little Willie or Tad running along at his 
heels, asking a thousand little quick questions, which his fother 
heard not, not even then knowing that little Willie or Tad was 
there, so abstracted was he. When he thus met a friend, he 
said that something put him in mind of a story which he heard 
in Indiana or elsewhere, and tell it he would, and there was no 
alternative but to listen. 

" Thus, I say, stood and walked and looked this singular 
man. He was odd, but when that gray eye and face and every 
feature were lit up by the inward soul in fires of emotion, then 



LINCOLN * 111 

it was that all these apparently ugly features sprang into organs 
of beauty, or sunk themselves into a sea of inspiration that 
sometimes flooded his face. Sometimes it appeared to me that 
Lincoln's soul was just fresh from the presence of its Creator." 

Abraham Lincoln was born poor ; had scarcely the 
bare rudiments of education and no money ; he lived 
in the backwoods, and had to do the exhausting and 
time-consuming manual labor of frontier settlements, in 
order to live ; he had not one single brilliant intellec- 
tual trait or faculty to help him ; he had neither books, 
teachers, money, nor time ; neither an intellectual home 
nor the culture of systematic study. Yet toiling to 
the uttermost, and simply doing his best with unbroken 
and undiscouraged steadiness, he lived a singularly 
useful, successful, and even a heroically symmetrical 
and noble life. He was a good citizen, a most benefi- 
cent friend and neighbor, a helper of the needy, only 
over-kind as a parent, an honest and able lawyer, a 
powerful and useful public speaker, a shrewd and yet 
a fair j^olitician, a lover of justice and right, a patient 
and just and determined and sagacious and far-seeing 
ruler. His fame is one with the saving of a nation and 
the redemption of a race ; he is one of those very few 
men whose names can not be forgotten, because his 
goodness, as well as his office, marks a great epoch in 
human history. 

There is no room here to quote any of the very nu- 
merous and enthusiastic praises that friends and foes 
alike have abundantly bestowed upon Mr. Lincoln. It 
is the fate of good and ba'd men alike to be reviled 
w^hile alive. But it must have been a good man whose 
memory shines with such bright unspotted splendor of 



112 THE PICTURE AND TIIE M.£N. 

praise as lias been awarded to Mr. Lincoln since his 
death. The rulers of England who did their best to 
help our nation into ruin under a lying pretense of neu- 
trality ; the English, newspapers that had ranted and 
sneered at us and at him all through the war ; life-long 
political opponents, thorough-going rebels, underhand 
traitors in the North, doubtful or dissatisfied partisans 
and unqualified supporters, all alike joined in one im- 
mense voice of unbroken commendation and mourning 
when he was taken away. And — what was a far 
nobler and more desirable possession than all — he had 
and still has the love and the prayers of the ignorant 
and oppressed negroes ; a voice that makes but small 
sound on earth, but which comes before the throne of 
God with a far stronger and loftier tone than that of 
all the white men who evef lauded him. If the Eman- 
cipation of the Slaves Avas the greatest deed since 
Christ, assuredly the blessings of the black people are 
the best blessings that any man has had since Christ. 

As one indication — though doubtless an uncertain 
test — of the extent and de'pth of Mr. Lincoln's popu- 
larity with the American people, it may be mentioned 
that since his death there has appeared a printed list 
of tliree hundred and eighty books, sermons, eulogies, 
and addresses upon his life or death ; and this list is by 
no means complete. 

The lessons of Mr. Lincoln's life are : the power of 
determined labor and thorough honesty, and the value 
of character, over and beyond any mere brilliancy or 
force of intellect ; and still more, the justness and 
soundness of the basis principles of our American lib- 
erty. Any European kingdom — say England — will be 



LINCOLN. 113 

as good a country as America, when a " hired man" 
shall by merit become its king. That simple test is 
typical of the two continents. In no other nation on 
earth than the United States can good qualities alone, 
without intrigue or lying, without shedding blood, or 
privy conspiracy, or levying war, carry a man through 
so lofty a career. 



114 THE riCTUEE AND THE MEN. 



WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD. 

Secretary Seward has during the rebellion had espe- 
cial official charfi^e of the foreign relations of the United 
States, and has likewise been often an adviser of the 
President about home affairs. Mr. Seward, before be- 
ing Secretary of State, had been United States Senator 
from New York, Governor of New York, and State 
Senator. Besides holding those important offices, he 
has been long and widely known as a laborious student, 
a good writer, a powerful orator, a shrewd and able 
lawyer, a skillful and successful politician and party- 
leader, and an enlightened statesman. Of the Cabinet 
of Mr. Lincoln, he was the only one who suggested 
any modifications actually adopted as to the Great 
Proclamation, and these w^erc important ones. He ad- 
vised and secured the insertion of the "words " and 
maintain" in that paper, where it had at first only said 
that it Avould "recognize" the freedom of the emancipat- 
ed slaves. And he suggested w^aiting to issue the Procla- 
mation accompanied with victory instead of defeat. 

Mr. Sew^ard was born at Florida, Orange County, 
New York, May IG, 1801. He w^as therefore eight 
years older than Mr. Lincoln, and is one year younger 
than the century. His father's ancestors were Welsh, 
and those of his mother, Mary Jennings, Irish. His 
grandfather, John Seward, was a Colonel in the Revo- 
lutionary army, and an energetic Whig leader in Sus- 



SEWAKD. 115 

sex County, Nev/ Jersey, where he lived. The Colo- 
nel's son, Samuel S. Seward, father of the Secretary, 
removed to Florida, New York, in 1795 ; and during 
the next twenty years accumulated a considerable for- 
tune by practicing as a physician, and at the same time 
doing a large mercantile business. After retiring from 
active employment, he used to lend a good deal of 
money to farmers in the vicinity, and he never excused 
any one from paying the legal interest, never would 
take more than that, and never demanded any of the 
principal from any one who J3aid the interest regularly. 
He was for a long time a holder of public ofEces, and 
for seventeen years county judge. 

Mary Jennings Seward, the Secretary's mother, was 
a woman of clear and strong mind, remark abl-e cheer- 
' fulness, a most diligent housewife, and charitable, hos- 
pitable, and beneficent. It would be difficult to choose 
a better parentage ; and it is easy to trace in Mr. Sew- 
ard the influence and the traits of both his parents. 
His remarkable and unfailing hopefulness and belief in 
the future is perhaps the most characteristic of all his 
mental traits ; and this he received from his mother. 
Plis father had chosen, instead of a portion in money, 
to receive a liberal education ; and this trait of desire 
for knowledge Avas reproduced in the son, but greatly 
intensified. He ran away, not from school, but to it ; 
he was always reading; and when some boys threw 
stones at him as he was studying Avhile driving the 
cows home, he was so intent on the book that he mere- 
ly turned round and walked backward to escape the 
missiles, still reading away. Coming to a small stream, 
he missed the bridge, and backed into the water. If 



116 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

an elder brother had not seen him and pulled him out 
still alive, though unconscious, his career would have 
ended then and there. 

Mr. SeAvard's wliole career has been marked by great 
aptness to work in and by means of j^olitically organ- 
ized forms and associations. This tendency was just 
about as distinct in him from his ninth to his fifteenth 
year, while he was at school at Goshen Academy, as 
when he bore a chief part in organizing and conduct- 
ing the Whig party, eighteen years afterward. At this 
academy the boy was a leading member of the " Clas- 
sical Society" and of the " Goshen Club," and the 
constitutions and minutes of both of them are mostly 
in his handwriting. When fifteen, he went to Schen- 
ectady to be examined for admission into Union Col- 
lege. He was found qualified for the junior class ; but 
was advised to enter sophomore because he was so 
young, and did so. 

His college course was successful, as might be ex- 
pected. He was laborious in the extreme, as he has 
been, both before and since ; he usually rose at four and 
worked up all his lessons for the day, and passed the 
evening in general reading, or studies and compositions 
for class or society literary exercises or debates, while 
the other students were doing the routine work that 
he was going to do next morning before breakfast. 

In the last year of his course, an aflTair occurred which 
brought out in young Seward with curious accuracy, 
and a singular sort of j^olitical antetyping, exactly the 
chief traits that have marked his subsequent career ; 
an ambition, subordinate to ethical principles; an ex- 
treme faith in his own beliefs ; power in setting forth 



SEWARD. 117 

those beliefs ; not an indifference to the judgments of 
others, but rather a behef in the justice of the judg- 
ments of others when they should have considered the 
whole matter ; and a strong love and reverence for the 
United States as a nation, free, one, and undivided. 
The circumstances were these : There were in the col- 
lege two literary societies, the Adelphic and Philoma- 
thean, young Seward being a member of the former. 
Some twenty-five Southern students had left Princeton, 
come to Union, and joined the Philomatheans. Sec- 
tional debates quickly arose, and the vote on them was 
against the Southerners, who seceded and formed a 
third society. On this state of facts arose a contro- 
versy within the Adelphic Society, whether the seces- 
sion was justifiable. On this controversy Seward, on 
returning from an absence South, found himself a sort 
of umpire in the society, heard arguments, and decided 
that the secession was wrong. This was agreeable to 
the freshmen and sophomores of the Adelphic, but 
not to his own classmates, the seniors, who caused 
a court of inquiry, Avith the view of expelling him 
from the Adelphic. There was a prosecutor, and the 
forms of a trial for misdemeanor were observed. Testi- 
mony was given, and Seward argued his own cause, 
making a strong argument, and following with a sjjir- 
ited review of his own conduct. He closed by avow- 
ing with enthusiastic rhetoric that he was indifferent to 
what the public prosecutor should say of him, had no 
wish to know who voted for or who against him, and 
w^ould not embarrass any member either by being pres- 
ent at the vote or by inquiring about it afterward — and 
BO ending, he went straight out of the room. The re- 



118 THE PICTrKE AND THE MEN. 

suit was a triumphant victory over the prosecution, and 
a handsome vindication of law and order, and of the 
principles of the Union. 

While still a student, Mr. Seward was chosen to make 
an address, on behalf of the young Republicans of the 
college, to Vice-President Tompkins, then visiting Schen- 
ectady ; and his speech on this occasion had so little 
of the student or politician, and so much of the orator 
and man in it, that it rendered the Vice-President, as 
long as he lived, a iirm and w^arm friend of the 
speaker. 

At graduation, Seward, against bitter opposition, ob- 
tained the highest honor of the day — an appointment 
by the Adelphic Society as commencement orator. The 
theme on which he spoke w^as one which, like the name 
of the college where he graduated, might be fancied a 
premonition of many things in the speaker's subsequent 
career. It was " The Integrity of the American Union." 
In the same class with Mr. Seward graduated Hon. 
William Kent, Rev. Dr. L. P. Hickok, the well-known 
metaphysician, and Rev. Tayler LcAvis, who, like Dr. 
Hickok, is now an officer of the college. 

Mr. Seward studied law under John Anthon, of New 
York city, and worked over his law books as hard as 
over liis class books. As he went through one work 
after another, he completed and tested his mastery of 
it by making a written analysis. He afterward studied 
with Messrs. John Duer and Ogden Hoffman, of Go- 
shen, was admitted to the bar in 1822, and in January, 
1823, fixed his residence at Auburn and went into a 
law partnership with Hon. Elijah Miller, an eminent 
lawyer and first judge of Cayuga County. During 



SEWABD. 119 

1824 he married Judge Miller's youngest daughter, 
Francis Adeline, who died during the rebellion. She 
was a woman of great excellence and of remarkable 
breadth of judgment and wisdom in counsel. 

During the early years of his residence at Auburn, 
Mr. Seward gave a good deal of time and labor to 
militia affairs, and rose to be colonel of a regiment. It 
is on record that he was " an excellent tactician and an 
accomplished commander." Doubtless this work was 
done in part for the sake of extending his acquaintance ; 
a reason which has occasioned the very same step to 
many a young lawyer, and Vv^ith like success. 

Mr. Seward, as his college career showed, was natu- 
rally disposed to politics. His tastes led that way, he 
had the abilities needed to gratify them, and his pecu- 
niary prospects were not such as to imprison him con- 
stantly within mere legal labors. As soon therefore as 
an occasion arose, he stepped promptly into the politi- 
cal arena, where he has been a strenuous and efficient 
combatant ever since, and of whose prizes there re- 
mains but one for which he need naturally feel any 
ambition. 

The real political question before the United States 
in those days was the same that has been forever de- 
cided by the rebellion. It was. Slavery or Freedom ? 
In February, 1820, the Missouri Compromise had been 
carried through Congress ; and doubtless the graduat- 
ing oration of young Seward, on " The Integrity of the 
Union," must have been insj)ired in theme and in doc- 
trine by the threats and flourishes about disunion and 
nullification which were flung about so freely in those 
days by Southern politicians. Mr. Seward's father was 



120 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

an earnest Jeffersonian Democrat, and, as frequently 
happens, the son followed at first in the footsteps of his 
parent. But he soon entered another road, and began 
with boldness, decision, and foresight, not by joining a 
powerful party, but by organizing an apparently feeble 
opposition. 

This was in October, 1824, when he drafted the ad- 
dress of the Republican Convention of Cayuga Coun- 
ty. This address was perhaps the first positive step of 
the measures wliich resulted in the formation of the 
Whig party. What it actually did for this purpose 
was, to make a public exposition of the history and 
principles and practices of that famous political circle 
the Albany Regency, thus preparing the way to attack 
and break down the power of the Democratic party in 
New York, so often the key State of our national 
politics. 

Within the next three years Mr. Seward on two im- 
portant occasions set forth in public his chief principles 
as a politician, being the same in substance as they still 
are. .The first of these was a Fourth-of-July Oration, 
at Auburn, in which he stated the powers of our na- 
tional government, claimed that the United States 
sliould be a city of refuge for all that are oppressed, 
and insisted with his accustomed zeal and confidence 
upon the perpetuity of the Union. The second of these 
occasions was during the Greek Revolution, when, in 
February, 1827, he addressed at Auburn a meeting to 
raise funds to aid the Greeks. This oration was an en- 
thusiastic appeal for liberty everywhere, and for liberal 
aid from the United States to those seekinc: it ; and the 
result was a most generous contribution. 



REWARD. 121 

At twenty-seven years of age, Mr. Seward presided, 
•with great ability and success, over tlie first political 
convention of the young men of Kew York, held at 
Utica, August 12, 1828. This convention was called 
in favor of John Quincy Adams as against Andrew 
Jackson ; but the general beat the statesman, and the 
defeat dissolved the " National Kepublican" party, at 
least in AYestern New York. The abduction of Wil- 
liam Morgan, of Batavia, in the autumn of 1826, had 
meanwhile raised up a furious whu'lwind of anti-ma- 
sonic excitement throughout Western New York, and 
the political " Anti-Masonic" party was forthwith found- 
ed upon it. The issue was, however, not broad enough 
for a national one. The anti-masons carried all before 
them in Western New York for some years ; once 
elected a Governor of Pennsylvania; in 1827 polled in 
New York a vote of 33,000, and two years later of 
128,000, but never elected their Governor; did govern 
Vermont for some years ; had a Presidential ticket (the 
Wirt and Ellmaker ticket) in the field in 1831, which, 
however, carried no State but Yermont ; and in a few 
years the tariif and currency questions of the Jackson 
period quite superseded the anti-masonic controversy. 

During the existence of the an ti masonic party, which 
was a sort of bridge between the Republicans and the 
Whigs, Mr. SeAvard was adopted by the anti-masons in 
1830, as candidate to the State Senate, and was elected 
by 2,000 majority, though Granger, anti-masonic can- 
didate for Governor, was beaten in the State by 8,000. 

The senatorship was followed by the Whig nomina- 
tion for Governor in 1834, Mr. Seward, however, being 
defeated by Mr. Marcy. But in 1838 he was elected, 



122 THE PICTURE AND* THE MEN. 

and by a large majority, and in 1840 was re-elected, 
declining a third nomination, notwithstanding the earn- 
est eflbrts of his friends to the contrary. The State 
senatorship and the service as Governor constitute Mr. 
Seward's career in the administration of State affairs, 
and his policy and the measures which he urged, adopt- 
ed, communicated, or originated give evidence of re- 
markable wisdom, practical judgment, foresight, and 
elevation of view. 

At entering the Senate Mr. Seward was not yet 
twenty-nine years of age, and was the youngest man 
who had ever been chosen to that body. The Legisla- 
ture, as v/ell as the State, Avas largely Jacksonian Dem- 
ocratic, and Mr. Seward, who had already inaugurated 
the opposition campaign in the country, at once enter- 
ed into the opposition ranks at the capital, and quickly 
became their acknowledged leader. But in conducting 
this opposition, as throughout his career in State ad- 
ministration, he sought to accomplish objects intrinsi- 
cally good, along with and as a means of, the objects 
of party and political success. He was distinctly a 
l^rogressive legislator. Thus, he quickly set to work 
to abolish imprisonment for debt, to improve the State 
prison discipline, to obtain a separate prison for female 
convicts, to promote the construction of the Chenango 
Canal, and that of the Erie Canal, an enterprise then 
struggling hard for life in the midst of political and 
money perplexities. His very first speech was as char- 
acteristic of his political originality and foresight, as 
his conduct of the college society prosecution was of 
his faith in himself and independence in thinking. It 
was a careful and elaborate argument for an entire 



SEWARD. 123 

change of the State militia system, urging the plan of 
volunteer uniform companies instead of the old fashion 
of obliging every citizen to do military duty. His 
views were adopted in substance — twenty years after- 
ward. 

Of a like wise and liberal spirit was his advocacy of 
the plan for publishing the well-known Documentary 
History of the State of New York, which -wag carried 
out while he was Governor, though the work was not 
published until after his term. When the people of 
New York city asked leave to elect their mayor, in- 
stead of having him appointed at Albany, he strongly 
urged the method by popular vote, for all other cities 
as Avell as New York. 

Mr. Seward was as young a Governor as he was sen- 
ator and student, being but thirty-seven when elected. 
He was only thirty-three when first nominated. This 
'youthfulness was strenuously urged against him, but to 
little jjurpose ; for the election carried him into the 
Governor's chair by a strong majority, and gave the 
Whig party — then but six years old — full control of 
the Empire State. During his service as Governor, Mr. 
Seward upheld in word and deed tlie measures and doc- 
trines of the Whig party. But with large wisdom, he 
also strove to join with those measures a readiness to 
adopt and perfect any improvement or scheme what- 
ever within the scope of government and calculated to 
do good. To establish a reputation for doing this must 
necessarily be a far more pennanent kind of party cap- 
ital than to be exclusively identified with some one 
measure or set of measures, whose definite victory or 
defeat must in either event end the existence of the 



124 THE PICTUKE A2n) THE MEN. 

party whose life they were. Thus he promoted the es- 
tablishmeut of the normal school system, according to 
the best lights of the day, and advocated that sound 
modern doctrine, that the state needs to enforce the ed- 
ucation of all children. "With judicious distinction be- 
tween true religion and religious intolerance, he favored 
the employment of Roman Catholic teachers for the 
children of those who would have no other. He urged, 
and at length saw adopted, the abolition of the special 
disabilities long inflicted on foreign-born citizens ; and 
when the mayor of New York city advised a tax on 
immigrants, with the idea of keeping them out and thus 
avoiding some of the poverty and crime which they 
brought with them, he met this short-sighted proposi- 
tion with a strong and clear explanation of the great 
value of the foreign laborer in developing the resources 
of our new country. Governor Seward clearly under- 
stood what the great French political philosopher De 
Tocqueville saw so clearly, that the free institutions of 
the United States find one main security in the multi- 
plication of centers of political power, as distinguished 
from the French or rather European or monarchical 
practice of centralizing that power wholly in the hands 
of the supreme government. Accordingly, he labored to 
secure the election of judges by the peoj^le, instead of 
the previous method, which gave the State judicial ap- 
pointments cither directly to the Governor or indirectly 
to the managers of the prevailing party, whichever that 
might be. 

Governor Seward was a firm, vigorous, and efficient 
friend of the Erie Canal, and stood by the great entcr- 
pi-iso tlirough good report and evil, until it was at last 



SEWARD. 125 

completed. It is an odd circumstance, as he related 
liimself in a speech on the completion of the Erie Rail- 
road, that he wrote what he thought the chef-cVceicvre 
of his college life, in the form of an argument to show 
that either the canal could never be completed, or if it 
should be it would ruin the State. The spirit of this 
production is very natural for a wise boy as contrasted 
with a wise man, but the boy's argument is of exactly 
the same intellectual character with the man's, in its 
forecasting, its earnest effort to judge of the future. 
He was as good a friend of railroads as of canals ; ma- 
terially aided in the completion of the Erie Railroad, as 
subsequently in the United States Senate he advocated 
the Pacific Railroad. Interest in such great industrial 
enterprises is however to be credited to higher and 
deeper views than those of party politics. It depends 
not on notions of what is best for a party, but of what 
is best for the community. 

Several critical affairs of public or international in- 
terest during Governor Seward's two terms tested his 
firmness and wisdom, and he stood the test very well. 
One of these was the " anti-rent trouble," which after- 
ward broke out into what was called the " Helderberg 
"War." The substance of this was an attempt, by the 
heirs of Stephen Van Rensselaer, Patroon of the manor 
of Rensselaerwyck, to collect the arrears of Mnt on 
certain perpetual leases of manorial lands. As the 
manor was fifty miles square, the territory arid popula- 
tion interested were enough to make quite a disturb- 
ance, the tenants resisting with violence and arms any 
attempts to collect the rents. Governor Seward, to 
begin with, issued a proclamation requiring submission 



126 THE riCTURE AND THE MEN. 

to the laws and application to the Legislature for any 
required relief, and at the same time a sufficient mili- 
tary force was sent with the sheriff, to enable him to 
serve process. Gov. Seward, in his annual message for 
1 840, recommended a commission to effect a compromise. 
Such a one was accordingly accepted by the tenants, 
but the landlords unwisely refused it, and the result has 
been some insurrectionary troubles, a persistent politi- 
cal agitation, and an immense number of lawsuits, the 
whole business ending in the gradual extinction of the 
feudal-tenure leases to the footing of ordinary freeholds. 
The landlords have thus been driven, with much vexa- 
tion and large expense, to just about the position where 
Governor Seward's suggestions would have placed them 
amicably a quarter of a century ago. 

Another and even more troublesome affair was the 
famous M'Leod case. M'Leod, a Canadian, having 
boasted, while in Niagara County, N. Y., that he had 
helped burn the steamer Caroline, on the night of 
December 29, 1837, during the so-called " Patriot War," 
was at once seized and held for trial on a charge of 
arson. The British minister protested, claiming that 
the burning was an act of Avar, and that M'Lcod was 
therefore not liable to civil trial. President Van Buren 
however decided that the act Avas a civil crime, of Avhich 
the New York courts had jurisdiction. In reply, the 
British minister, after the manner of his nation, threat- 
ened hostilities if M'Leod was not given up ; and Gen- 
eral Harrison, on succeeding Mr. Van Buren, in sub- 
stance reversed his predecessor's opinion, and urged 
that a nolle should be entered in the State court in the 
case. Thus Great Britain and the United States were 



SEWAKD. 127 

both against N'ew York ; but Mr. Seward quietly caused 
M'Leod to be tried in regular course of law. He was 
acquitted ; and then, and not before, Governor Seward 
had him sent under escort into Canadian territory. 
The British did not fulfill any of their threats. 

At the end of his term, Governor Seward resigned 
his chair to his successor, Governor Bouck, whom he 
introduced in form and with kindly courtesy to the 
people of Albany — a wise and good-natured deed, 
never before done in the State. One week after leav- 
ing the governorship he was hard at work in his law 
office in Auburn, and he at once resumed and largely 
increased a profitable business in the State courts. 
This was in a year or two somewhat modified, as his 
talent for managing patent cases soon brought him a 
large practice in the United States courts. During the 
six years between the governorship and his election to 
the United States Senate in February, 1849, besides his 
large law business, he was constantly consulted by the 
Whig leaders, and was an efficient laborer in aid of 
that party during the Presidential campaigns of 1844 
and 1848. He was elected United States senator by a 
vote of 121 to 30. 

Mr. Seward's senatorial career lasted twelve years, 
including the administrations of Presidents Taylor, 
Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan ; and covered that 
liistorically important period during which the N^orth 
and South were verging toward the tAVO opposite atti- 
tudes on the moral-political question of slavery, which 
resulted in the rebellion. During all this period Mr. 
Seward was a powerful and steadfast champion, ac- 
cording to his own views of expediency and right, of 



128 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

the anti-slavery extension sentiments of the North. 
While President Taylor lived, Mr. Seward was one of 
his closest friends and counselors. At the instant of 
his reaching Washington, he found the principle of 
slavery involved in a money bill then before the Senate, 
to which. Mr. Walker, of Mississippi, had proposed an 
amendment that would annul in the Mexican territories, 
just acquired, the Mexican laws prohibiting slavery. 
The Senate adopted the amendment ; but Mr. Seward, 
without losing a moment, set to work to secure its^ de- 
feat in the House. After a long and violent debate 
the House rejected it, and the Senate receded, on the 
very last night of the session. The next crisis in the 
great contest was the struggle over the admission of 
California, and it was in his speech on this question, 
March 11, 1850, that Mr. Seward used that phrase 
"The Higher Law," which has since been so often re- 
peated in praise and blame. This famous term was 
used in arguing that while the Constitution " devotes 
the national domain to union, to justice, to defense, to 
welfare, and to liberty," " there is a higher law than 
the Constitution, which regulates our authority over 
that domain, and devotes it to, the same noble 2^urposes.''^ 
The term was thus used in proving the agreement of 
the law of God with the Constitution of the United 
States ; and it is difficult now to see what fault could 
be found with it. 

Whenever the question of human freedom arose, Mr. 
Seward labored and voted in its favor. He was a con- 
sistent and vigorous opponent of the fugitive slave bill, 
of the pro-slavery element in Mr. Clay's " compromise," 
and of all those successive victories of slavery which 



SEWARD. 129 

culminated in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 
the Kansas iniquities, the Dred Scott decision, and 
wliich worked their own defeat through the reaction 
which they caused in the North. As in his j^outh he 
had argued in favor of the Greeks in their strife against 
Turkey, so now he spoke earnestly in favor of the Hun- 
cjarians. Upon questions affecting the industrial and 
social interests of the United States, Mr. Seward's 
course in the Senate was substantially a continuation 
of that which he pursued while legislator and Governor 
in New York. 

As senator, he was remarkably successful in continu- 
ing on good terms personally with the imperious and 
unscrupulous Southern politicians, whose plans he was 
opposing with all his might. He was, it is true, some- 
times treated with discourtesy. One violent fellow 
proposed to expel him for words used in debate on the 
fugitive slave bill, and to this threat he replied in his 
place with dignity and force, quietly defying the threat, 
and agreeing that on the trial of the question he would 
use no defense except the very speeches for which the 
expulsion was threatened. Of course the threat was 
not fulfilled ; the gag-law day was twenty years before. 

In 1858, in an election speech at Rochester, Mr. 
Seward furnished to cotemporary English a second 
phrase, which has perhaps been more repeated even 
than " Higher Law." This was " Irrepressible Conflict." 
The words were used in speaking of the collisions be- 
tween slave and free labor in the United States, in the 
following sentences: 

" Shall I tell you what this collision means ? They 
Avho think it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of in- 



130 THE riCTCRE AND THE MEN. 

terested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, 
mistake the case altogether. It is an irreiyressihle con- 
flict between opposing and enduring forces, and it 
means that the United States must and will, sooner or 
later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or 
entirely a free-labor nation." This was exactly the 
substance of what Mr. Lincoln said in his great speech 
at Springfield, Illinois, in the same summer : " I believe 
this Government can not endure permanently half slave 
and half free," etc. But Mr. Lincoln was not then a 
man of first-class national reputation, and he dul not 
put his thought into a neat jArase. In 1856 as well as 
in 1861 Mr. Seward was preferred by many Republi- 
cans as candidate for the Presidency, and on the first 
ballot at Chicago in 1860 he received 173 votes to Mr. 
Lincoln's 103. During both those campaigns, Mr. 
Seward in good faith and effectively supported his 
party and its candidates, and Mr. Lincoln, upon elec- 
tion, at once offered to his late competitor the place 
of Secretary of State. This office has given to Mr. 
Seward a very influential part in managing the foreign 
affairs of the United States during the difficult and 
dangerous 2')eriod of the rebellion. His performance 
of this duty — as indeed has. been the case with most or 
all his previous public labors — ^has been highly praised 
and deeply blamed. But whether his views have 
always been correct or not, the fact remains, that wliile 
the governments of Europe were ardently desirous of 
the destruction of this republic, yet no foreign war 
came upon us while hampered by the rebellion ; and 
that it is certainly doubtful what the issue would have 
been had the contrary taken place. Of both President 



SEWAED. 131 

Lincoln and President Johnson, Mr. Seward has been 
a most constant and trusted adviser. During Mr. Lin- 
coln's visit to Richmond, Mr. Seward was thrown from 
a carriage, and his arm and jaw w^ere broken. He w^as 
still confined to his bed when the President returned, 
and making liis first visit to the Secretary, he threw 
himself down across the foot of his bed, and resting his 
head on one hand, joyfully told the story of his trij) 
and of the entire success of Grant, ending w^ith the 
words, "and now for a day of thanksgiving!" The 
Secretary advised, however, to wait until Sherman was 
heard from, to which Mr. Lincoln agreed, though with 
reluctance. Mr. Seward, in speaking of his own and 
Mr. Lincoln's agreement as to government measures, 
remarked to a friend, " ISTo knife was ever sharp enough 
to divide us upon any question of public policy, though 
we frequently arrived at the same conclusion through 
different processes of thought. Once only did we dis- 
agree in sentiment." When asked on w^hat occasion, 
the answer W' as, " His * colonization' scheme ; ^vhich I 
opposed on the self-evident principle that all natives of 
a country have an equal right to the soil." 

Mr. Seward was made a victim of the same conspir- 
acy which assassinated Mr.* Lincoln. While confined 
lielpless to his bed by the injuries received from his 
fall, he was attacked by a powerful young man named 
Lewis Payne* Powell, and fearfully stabbed and cut ; 
and only very wonderful vigor of constitution and te- 
nacity of life could have enabled him to recover so com- 
pletely from injuries so serious. Mr. Carpenter's ac- 
count of the way in which Mr. Seward detected the 
fact of the President's death, which his attendants had 



132 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

been carefully concealing from him, is striking. He 
says : 

"The Sunday following, he had his bed wheeled 
around so that he could see the tops of the trees in the 
park opposite his residence— just putting on their 
spring foliage — when his eyes caught sight of the Stars 
and Stripes at half mast on the War Department, on 
which he gazed awhile, then turning to his attendant 
said : ' The President is dead 1' The confused attend- 
ant stammered as he tried to say nay ; but the Secre- 
tary could not be deceived. * If he had been alive, he 
would have been the first to call on me,' he continued ; 
* but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how 
I am ; and there is the flag at half-mast.' The states- 
man's inductive reason had discerned the truth, and in 
silence the great tears coursed down his gashed cheeks 
as it sank into his heart." 

Perhaps the chief points in Mr. Seward's character 
may be summed thus : In politics, he is a shrewd, prac- 
tical manager; in statesmanship, he is hopeful, liberal, 
utilitarian, and far-sighted; in mind, he is always 
chiefly a reasoner though also a rhetorician, and a reas- 
oner from first principles, with a peculiar tendency to 
forecasting. Besides these chief traits, he is very in- 
dustrious, independent, self-reliant, and benevolent. 
There have also been indications of the same desire in 
him for a high future fame, which many great men of 
ancient times possessed, and which grows rare in these 
days. It is said that his life-long opposition to slavery 
was first brought into vivid activity by an incident at 
the South, where he passed a portion of his senior col- 
lege year as a teacher. He was traveling, it appears, 



SEWAKD. 133 

on horseback, and found a slave woman, with a miser- 
able old blind horse and a bag of corn, on her way to 
mill, but afraid to try to cross a broken-down bridge. 
In trying to help her over, the old horse fell partly 
through the bridge and stuck fast. The young man 
was unable to get him out, and so he mounted his own 
horse, rode to the house of the master of the slave, and 
told him the story, seeking to excuse the slave. But 
the planter replied with a monstrous bombardment of 
curses on himself, the slave, the horse, the bridge, and 
pretty much everything and everybody. The whole 
affair so deeply disgusted him that the impression was 
never forgotten. 

Besides his political career and his labors as a lawyer, 
Mr. Seward has shown decided ability as a business 
man, and in literature. In the former capacity he acted 
for the year or two about 1836 when he served as agent 
to settle the complicated and confused aifairs of the 
Holland Land Company, which he adjusted with great 
tact and judgment. His literary productions, the occa- 
sional hasty work of scanty leisure, include a number of 
addresses on anniversary and society occasions, obitu- 
ary orations on John Quincy Adams, Daniel O'Connell, 
Lafayette, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and others — 
a published biography of John Quincy Adams, and the 
historical introduction to the great State " Natural His- 
tory of New York." 

A good instance of the effectiveness of Mr. Seward's 
mode of arguing from general principles to particular 
cases occurred in the New York Court of Errors about 
1834. This court was the court of final appeal in the 
State, and consisted of the chancellor, the judges of the 



ISA " THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

Supreme Court, and the members of the State Senate. 
Mr. Seward was the youngest member of this court, 
but a diligent, laborious, and useful member. On the 
occasion referred to — the case of Parks vs. Jackson, the 
appeal was from the Supreme Court, whei-e a technical 
legal rule had been so applied as to take away from 
certain parties estates which they had honestly bought 
and paid for. According to the forms of the Court of 
Errors, Judge Nelson, now of the United States Su- 
preme Court, then of the State Supreme Court, stated 
the reasons for the decision of his court. Then Chan- 
cellor AYal worth delivered an opinion, in which he de- 
fended the decision. Mr. Seward now rose, and made 
an argument on the contrary part, in which he urged 
the claims of substantial justice as higher than those 
of an arbitrary legal rule. The question Avas taken on 
reversing the judgment. The judges of the court ap- 
pealed from did not vote ; but excej)t Chancellor Wal- 
worth, who abode by his technics, every vote was given 
in favor of the reversal wdiicli Mr. Seward demanded. 

A curious and characteristic specimen of Mr. Seward's 
methods of thought when applied out of place, and of 
his thorough confidence in the correctness of his own 
views, is given in his criticism upon Mr. Carpenter's 
great commemorative picture. He rather abruptly 
said to the artist one evening, " I told the President the 
other day that you were painting your picture on a 
false presumption." The artist, surprised, asked why. 
The Secretary explained, that it was the election of 
Mr. Lincoln, not the proclamation, which was the 
death-knell of slavery.; that the business of Mr. Lin- 
coln's administration was not abolition, but the salva- 



SEWAKD. 135 

tion of tlie nation; and, he continued, "Had you con- 
sulted me for a subject to paint, I should not have given 
you the Cabinet Council on Emancipation, but the 
meeting which took place when the news came of the 
attack upon Sumter, when the first measures were or- 
ganized for the restoration of the national authority. 
That was the crisis in the history of this administration 
— not the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation." 
And referring again to the comparative unimportance 
of the slavery question, he continued : " If I am to be 
remembered by posterity, let it not be as having loved 
predominantly white men or black men, but as one who 
loved his country." Mr. Carpenter argued to the con- 
trary, but the Secretary stuck to his opinion. " Well," 
he said, " you may think so, and this generation may 
agree with you, but posterity will hold a different 
opinion." It may be added, that the picture of Mr. 
Buchanan in the corner, white with terror, and with 
a stump of a cigar between his teeth, with his Cabinet 
quarreling so hard that he had to turn them all out, 
according to Mr. Stanton's description, would have 
been a strange subject to adopt as the characteristic 
scene of the war. In this preference Mr. Seward was 
wrong. His reasoning as a statesman may have been 
correct enough in one sense, but the chief cause or oc- 
casion of a circumstance is not necessarily the best art- 
istic representation of its spirit; and Mr. Carpenter 
certainly judged justly as an artist. 

The position and attitude of Mr, Seward in Mr. Car- 
pentei-'s picture are prominent and characteristic. The 
Secretary of State is by etiquette the senior member 
of the Cabinet ; Mr. Seward was, moreover, by virtue 



136 THE PICTUKE AND TUE MEN. 

of liis abilities, attainments, and principles, a chief ad- 
viser with the President, unofficially. So he sits at the 
front of the table, his hand rested upon it in an argu- 
mentative posture, with fore-finger, as it were, dis- 
tinguishing the exact point to be made. The face ex- 
presses steady sense and calm thought, as the Secretary 
advises to wait for military success before the issuing 
of the Proclamation, instead of putting it forth upon 
the heels of disaster. 



CHASE. 137 



YI. 
S. P. CHASE. 

Salmon Poktlaxd Chase now Chief-Justice of the 
United States, was born in Cornish, New Hampshire, 
January 13, 1808. His father was a farmer, and the 
country was so unsettled, schools so scarce, and books so 
costly, that when at three years of age it was time for 
the boy to learn his letters, they were set down for him 
on smooth pieces of birch-bark. 

The name of Chase is somewhat widely spread in 
ISTew Hampshire and Vermont. It is said that it was 
of the family to which the Chief-Justice belongs, that 
the saying was first uttered which has since, with a dif 
ference, been applied to Dr. Lyman Beecher. The story 
is that some one said of an old yellow house in Corn- 
ish, long the Chase homestead, that in it had been born 
more brains than in any other house in New England. 
Philander Chase, the eminent pioneer Episcopal bishop 
of Ohio, was the Chief Justice's uncle ; and so was 
Dudley Chase, at one time United States senator from 
Vermont. Another uncle, Salmon, a lawyer in Port- 
land, had died there, and after him and the. city the 
Chief-Justice was named. The men of the Chase fam- 
ily are tall, strong, large-framed, large-headed, decided, 
energetic, and progressive men, and the Chief Justice 
does no discredit to his kinsmen, either in physique or 
in mind and will 



138 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

In 1 815, liis father, Ithamar Chase, removed to Keene, 
to superintend a glass fiictory there in which he was 
largely interested ; but three years afterward died sud- 
denly, probably by a sun-stroke. His affairs were at 
the time much deranged in consequence of the ruinous 
competition of English glass with the products of his 
factory; and tlie widoAv, upon the settlement of the es- 
tate, was able to retain nothing, either from the factory, 
or from a tavern, or a farm which the energetic man 
]iad carried on at the same time with reasonable suc- 
cess. But Mrs. Chase had much of the prudence and 
force of character of her own Scottish ancestry, and 
having a small property of her own, she removed to a 
little cottage in the neighborhood and set to work with 
good courage and full faith to bring up her children. 
Salmon, with one of his sisters, a little afterward spent 
some time at a boarding-school, in Windsor, Yt., w^herc 
he made a good beginning in Latin, and where he par- 
took in an odd style of chastisement, invented appa- 
rently by the Yankee principal. This gentleman, when 
the boys were noisy at night and awoke him, nsed to 
come noiselessly np to their door, burst in, drag them 
all out of bed by the hair into a pile in the middle of 
the floor, and disappear to allow them to digest his 
hint. One of the youths shaved his hair close to elude 
the teacher's hand ; but only to discover that portions 
of the human frame, very distant from the head, could 
also be made to suffer pain. 

In 1820, Bishop Chase offered to take charge of the 
boy in Ohio and give him an education, and with an 
elder brother on the way to join the expedition of Gen- 
eral Cass to the upper Mississippi, and with Mr. School- 



CHASE. 139 

craft, geologist to the same expedition, lie went "West. 
The party stopped at Buffalo, and Alexander Chase 
and Mr. Schoolcraft made a two days' visit to Niagara, 
leaving the boy behind as too young. He was, how- 
ever, quite as curious and enterprising as he was young ; 
and finding at the tavern a companion of his own age 
equally desirous to see the Falls, the two little fellows 
walked through the snow twenty miles to Niagara, 
saw the sight, found their surprised seniors, and return- 
ed with them. At Cleveland Salmon stopped, to pro- 
ceed to WoiAthington, Ohio, the other two going on to 
Detroit. As he could not go alone through the woods, 
he had to wait some weeks for convoy at Cleveland, 
and turned the time to account by running a sort of 
extempore ferry across the Cuyahoga. This was in 
order to pay his board with his entertainer ; but that 
gentleman, a warm admirer of Bishop Chase, refused 
to accept the money. 

At Worthington young Chase remained about two 
years, and had a reasonably severe experience. His 
uncle the bishop was a somewhat absolute person and 
stern in his manner. He was poor besides ; for in 
Ohio in those days money was so scarce, transportation 
so dear, produce so cheap, and postage so high, that 
it took a bushel of wheat to pay the postage on a 
letter, and the bishop used to say that all the rev- 
enues of his bishopric would not pay his postage bill. 
So he kept a school, by means of an assistant, and car- 
ried on a farm, as unavoidable means for supporting 
liimself Salmon, therefore, not being a boarder like 
the other boys, but a member of the family, had to 
work as the family did, " doing chores" and all sorts of 



140 THE riCTURE AND THE MEN. 

farm labor, and learning and reciting Lis lessons in such 
other time as he could command. He toiled resolutely 
through everything, however, and stood well in his 
classes. He was quite near-sighted, which was an ad- 
ditional obstacle; and he lisped considerably, besides; 
but he got rid of this last difficulty by pursuing for a 
number of months a course of reading aloud for the 
purpose. Notwithstanding the arbitrary and severe 
ways of Bishop Chase, he seems to have discerned the 
good qualities of his nephew ; for one day, when the 
youth asked leave to go in swimming with some other 
boys, the bishop refused, saying, " Wliy, Salmon, the 
country might lose its future President if you should 
get drowned !" 

In the autumn of 1822 Bishop Chase removed to 
Cincinnati to take charge of a college there, and took 
his nephew with him. Tlie youth entered freshman, but 
worked rapidly ahead of the regular course by reciting 
privately to a fellow-student, so that he was soon able 
to be examined for and enter into the sophomore class. 

When in 1823 Bishop Chase left Cincinnati for that 
journey to Europe in which he collected the means of 
founding Kenyon College, young Chase had to leave 
too, and coming East with the bishop and his family, 
he returned home to Keene, intending to enter and 
graduate at Dartmouth. After an unsuccessful experi- 
ment at teaching district school, he passed the winter 
at home in study ; during the following summer passed 
a short time at the academy at Koyalton, Vt., and then 
entered junior at Dartmouth. 

Here he worked as hard as ever, and graduated eighth 
in rank. He was in those days occasionally somewhat 



CHASE. 14-1 

absent-minded, and once, pulling off his trowsers, with 
some vague notion of toilet management, and beating 
them over a chair to get the dust out, j^ounded to 
pieces his watch, which he left in the fob. A rather 
more creditable occurrence during his college days at 
Dartmouth, showed the same quick and strong sense 
of justice and indignation at wrong which has always 
been a prominent trait in his character. A class-mate 
was sent away from college by the faculty for some 
transgression of wdiich he was not guilty, having been 
given, after the fashion of ficulty tribunals, twenty-four 
hours in which to confess what he did not do, and hav- 
ing b^en refused permission to see his accuser. Young 
Chase hereupon remonstrated w4th the president, but 
without avail, and he therefore coolly told the digni- 
tary that he would also leave, as he did not wish to re- 
main where his friends were liable to such injustice. 
They went together, accordingly, their class-mates 
agreeing in regret for the injustice of the action. But 
they had not driven fairly out of sight in their old gig, 
before a student rode after them to notify them that the 
sentence was reconsidered and that they might return. 
They, however, observed that they must have a few 
days in which to see if they Avould reconsider ; and 
taking a week's vacation, they went back. 

In the autumn of 1820 the young man went to Wash- 
ington, where his uncle, Dudley Chase, was senator from 
Vermont. His intentionwas to set up a private school, 
but having advertised and waited in vain until his last 
dollar was gone, he asked his uncle to obtain him a 
place under the Government. The senator, however, 
replied that lie had once obtained an appointment for 



142 THE nCTURE AND THE MEN. 

a nephew, and it ruined him. And he added, " If you 
want Jialf a dollar to buy a sj^ade and go out and 
dig for a living, I'll give it to you cheerfully ; but I 
will not get you a place under Government." The dis- 
couraged youth departed, and waited some time longer, 
until by good fortune a certain Mr. Plumley made over 
to him his classical school, already established and prof- 
itable. This was in consequence of the still greater suc- 
cess of a girls' school which Mrs. Plumley had opened, 
and which required the labor of both. Many years 
afterward, Mr. Chase, Avhen Secretary of the Treasury, 
had the pleasure of returning Mr. Plumley's kindness 
when a return was needed, by giving him a good posi- 
tion in the Treasury Department. 

Mr. Chase continued his school until the end of 1839. 
During this period he decided to study law, having 
been hitherto uncertain whether not to become a cler- 
gyman. He now, however, entered the office of William 
Wirt as a student, and became also a visitor at his 
house. From the savings of his income, now quite a 
good one for him, he had the pleasure of repaying to 
his mother the money she had advanced him, and of 
securing to one of his sisters a good education. A cu- 
rious occurrence during this same j^eriod also seemed 
to mark a great change in his health and personal ap^ 
pcarance. He had always been slender, pale, and 
stooping, and this latter defect he set about trying to 
remedy. As he stood one morning stretching himself 
up straight by the fire, all at once a sensation of faint- 
ness came over him and something in his side seemed 
to give way and sink down. A physician told him that 
this was the breaking of some inward adhesion conse- 



CHASE. 143 

quent upon his habit of stooping, and tliat its rupture 
was a good thing. The young man now arranged his 
desk and organized a set of exercises, to correct his 
stoop. He succeeded entirely, and from that time he 
grew straight and strong, until he acquired the erect 
and massive dignity of person which has been so con- 
spicuous in his manhood. 

In February, 1830, the young law-student passed his 
examination for admission to the bar, and at its close 
was recommended to read another year. But he an- 
swered that that was inconsistent with his plans, as he 
had made all his arrangements to go into practice at 
Cinciifnati. 

" To Cincinnati ?" said the examining judge, as much 
as to say, " You know enough for that !" and continued, 
with a smile, " Mr. Clerk, swear in Mr. Chase." 

The young lawyer went to Cincinnati, then a rapidly 
growing place of about 25,000 inhabitants, and opened 
his office accordingly. His early experience here as a 
lawyer was much like that of the outset of his career as 
a teacher at Washington. For a long time he had ab- 
solutely no business except drawing one agreement for a 
chance customer who paid him half a dollar, and about 
a Aveek afterward came and borrowed it back ! When 
reduced almost to despair, however, as in Washington, 
he had the good fortune to find a friend, a Mr. John 
Young, who loaned him without security "all the 
money he wanted." After a long time a little business 
came in. His employers found him faithful and com- 
petent, and were pretty sure to come back to him. 
Having once fairly started, his legal career was one of 
steady and increasing success, and was marked by 



144 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

many occurrences of interest. In his very first case of 
any importance the judge charged directly against him, 
but the jury found in his favor. In the next case he 
attacked and broke down together the testimony and 
the character of a notoriously violent fellow, an import- 
ant witness against him, who threatened to have his 
blood. Mr. Chase's friends begged him to arm him- 
self, but he declined, and the fellow at the close of the 
court put himself in tlie lawyer's way with the evident 
intention of assaulting him. But so calm and stern 
was the lawyer's face that the rowdy's heart failed him, 
and he walked oif. 

In 1834 Mr. Chase went to Columbus to make his 
first argument before a United States court. On rising 
to speak, he was so much agitated by apprehensions 
about what was to him a matter of so much itnportance, 
that he could not utter a single sentence. He sat down, 
and recovering himself, and in a great rage at himself 
for his failure, he rose again in a few moments, deliver- 
ed his argument, and then sat down again, still in deep 
mortification at his false start. It was therefore with 
surprise tliat he saw one of the judges come and shake 
his hand, saying, smilingly, " I congratulate you most 
sincerely !" 

" On what, sir ?'* asked the puzzled lawyer. 

"On your failure," said the judge. "A person of 
ordinary temperament and abilities would have gone 
through his part without any such symptoms of nerv- 
ousness. But when I see a young man break down 
once or twice in that way, I conceive the highest hopes 
of him." 

In this same year Mr. Chase married and established 



CHASE. 145 

ill Cincinnati a home of his own, and Jias ever since 
been a resident of that city excej^t when at Wasliing- 
ton. During, or before these earliest years of his pros- 
perity, Mr. Chase compiled a very thorough edition of 
the Ohio statutes in three octavo volumes, with full 
notes and an introductory history of the State. As no 
complete edition had before been published, the work 
was a very great assistance to the legal profession, and 
quickly became the standard edition, recognized as 
authority in all the courts. This work was in itself of 
small direct pccuniaiy profit, but it materially advanced 
the author's reputation. He soon became solicitor of 
the United States Bank at Cincinnati, and also of one 
of the city banks, and rose into a very good practice. 

Those who become senators of the United States 
have to prepare the way for election to that body by 
becoming influential in the politics of their State. Mr. 
Chase's public career from about 1836, the date of the 
Cincinnati mob which destroyed Mr. Birney's aboli- 
tionist newspaper, the Philantliropist^ brought him 
into such a position. The road which he followed was 
that successively of abolitionist lawyer. Liberty j^arty 
man, Free-soiler, and Republican, and in this road he 
not only gratified his intense love of justice and human 
right, and his intense hatred of wrong and oppression, 
but, as it happened, represented and led from the first a 
very considerable and increasing number of the voters 
of Ohio. This State was so largely settled from New 
England, and imbued with New England morals, that 
it adopted early the anti-slavery tenets of the best 
Eastern minds. More than this — it is always found 
that good things from the East grow large and strong 
10 



146 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

when they are transplanted to the West, like trees 
transferred to a richer and deeper soil ; and thus Ohio 
» quickly became the strongest anti-slavery State in the 
Union, excej^t, perhaps, Massachusetts. 

On the occasion of the mob before mentioned, their 
noise had attracted Mr. Chase's attention, and he had 
gone into the streets to see the proceedings. While 
they confined themselves to a forcible entry into Mr. 
Birney's printing-office, and the destruction of his 
presses, type, paper, and other stock, he did not inter- 
fere. But when he heard them threatening to seize 
Mr. Birney himself, he hastened by another road round 
to the hotel where Mr. Birney was living, and quietly 
stood in the doorAvay when they came up. As the 
foremost Avould have forced a way in, he ordered them 
back, and argued with them at the same time against 
either assaulting him or injuring the premises. He 
thus delayed them some time, until just as they Avere 
getting so impatient as to be apparently on the point 
of making a rush, a well-known citizen appeared and 
assured the crowd that Mr. Birney was certainly no- 
where in the house, and they went disappointed away. 
It was true. lie had escaped while Mr. Chase singly 
held back the mob, very probably saving the life of the 
" abolitionist." 

Almost immediately after this, Mr. Chase began a 
noble series of unpaid defenses of colored persons seized 
as fugitive slaves. This he did against a tremendously 
bitter and angry public opinion, against the perfectly 
open pre-judgments of the courts, and out of devotion to 
justice and to the cause of the oppressed. Tlie first of 
these cases was that of the slave-girl Matilda, seized in 



CHASE. 



U7 



Cincinnati as a fugitive slave in 1837, in whose defense 
Mr. Chase argued on habeas corjnis before the Court 
of Common Pleas. The defense failed, and the girl was 
surrendered to her owner and carried hack. As Mr. 
Chase went out of the court-room, a certain conserva- 
tive and respectable citizen observed, "There goes a 
promising young man who has just ruined himself." 
But not only was this series of defenses a i^rincipal 
reason in general for Mr. Chase's influence and popu- 
larity w^ith the Free-soil party and the Republican 
party, but this very case, where the wiseacre thought 
him " ruined," was a direct and important cause of his 
election to the United States Senate. There happened 
to be present during this argument a young medical 
student named Townsend, who Avas afterward, in 1848, 
a member of the Legislature, and was an earnest advo- 
cate of Mr. Chase's election. As belonging to neither 
party, he had much influence with the more liberal of 
the Democrats, and with a few more of the same 
opinions he succeeded in repealing a disgraceful code 
of " Black Laws" then in force in Ohio, and in securing 
Mr. Chase's election. 

In 1842 came up the famous Van Zandt case. Van 
Zandt, who was the original of Van Tromp in Mrs. 
Stowe's novel of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," had been sued 
for damages for carrying off certain fugitive slaves. 
He did not know them to be such, however, though he 
may have suspected it. Mr. Chase's argument in de- 
fense of Van Zandt was a wonderfully powerful and 
convincing argument. It seemed to entirely convince 
court, jury, and spectators, and the slaveholding plain- 
tiff himself, under the influence of this eloquent plea for 



14S THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

human rights, came to Mr. Chase, acknowledged that 
he was in the wrong, said he did not doubt that he 
had lost his case, and that he was sorry for having 
brought the action. So the plaintiff, as well as every- 
body else, was astounded when the jury gave him a 
verdict. A second suit Avas brousrht ao^ainst Van 
Zandt, for a penalty for having " harbored and con- 
cealed" fugitives, and this was carried up to the Su- 
preme Court at Washington by the defense. Mr. 
Chase and Mr. Seward argued it, without compensa- 
tion; but that court, then, and long afterward, the 
strongest citadel of the slave power, confirmed the de- 
cision of the courts below, and Yan Zandt had to pay 
the money. These two losses pretty much ruined him ; 
but he is not known to bav^e recrretted the action for 
which he suffered. 

In the "Watson case, the Rosetta case, the Parish 
case, and other well-known fugitive-slave cases occur- 
ring during the period from 1845 to 1856, Mr. Chase 
served with unfailing ardor the cause of freedom. The 
prevailing pro-slavery opinions of the community and 
the courts alike rendered this work futile so far as con- 
cerned the wretched negroes who were regularly thrust 
back into the pit they had struggled out of. But the 
labor Avas done for the sake of the jjiinciple involved; and 
no such series of efforts can be made on the right side 
without causing a gradual change in public sentiment. 
This change, proceeding in Ohio as in the whole North, 
was largely caused by Mr. Chase's powerful and fear- 
less advocacy of the helpless and j)enniless victims that 
he could not save, and at the earliest possible moment 
he took care to organize his friends into one of those 



CHASE. 149 

party machines which, in the United States, must be 
set up before a political principle can be embodied in 
the laAYS. Mr. Chase has been called " the Father of 
the Republican party." He was at any rate one of the 
earliest and chiefest of those who formed the " Liberty 
party," and who rose with it as it expanded into the 
" Free -soil party," and then into the "Republican 
party." In 1841 he assembled a small meeting at Cin- 
cinnati and addressed it, in explanation of the doc- 
trines on which a party for freedom could be organized, 
and he then went on to issue a call for a convention of 
those opposed to the extension of slavery at Columbus. 
This was a line of political action so unpopular that 
the newspaper editors — who have a pretty keen scent 
for such qualities — would not publish his call, and he 
had to pay for it as an advertisement. But the con- 
A^ention met, issued an address written by Mr. Chase, 
and organized the Liberty party. 

He was now a political leader, and from this time 
forward he gave whatever of his life could be sj^ared 
from his business to the service of the new party. Li 
1843 he assisted at the IS'ational Liberty Convention 
at Buffalo ; in 1845 he was the chief means of gather- 
ing a " Southern and Western Liberty Convention" at 
Cincinnati. He was prominent at the Free Territory 
State Convention of Ohio in 1848, and was chairman 
of the Buifalo Convention of that year. Mr. Birney 
was the first anti-slavery candidate for President. In 
1840, he had received about ^,000 votes, scattering and 
spontaneous testimonials rather than from an organized 
effort. In 1844 he received about 62,Y00 — enough, it 
was considered, to reduce Mr. Clay's vote and give the 



150 THE riCTUEE AND THE MEN. 

Presidency to Mr. Polk ; and most furious was the 
anger of the Whigs against what they considered the 
unjust and wicked trick. Of course, when so many 
voters began to declare for any principle, the regular 
party leaders could begin to see that the principle 
might be correct, and the Ohio Democratic State Con- 
vention took distinct ground against slavery extension. 
Upon this, Mr. 'Chase joined himself politically with 
that party, giving them at the same time notice that 
he should leave them when they left that ground. He 
did as he had said in 1852, on their accepting the 
Pierce platform. 

It was by a coalition between the Democrats and 
Free-soilers of Ohio, greatly promoted, as Ave have 
already described, by Dr. Townsend, that Mr. Chase 
w^as elected United States senator, February 22d, 1849, 
and returned as an influential ruler of the land, to the 
city Avhich he had left nineteen years before, an obscure 
and unfledged lawyer. He entered the Senate at the 
same time with Mr. Seward, and his labors as a states- 
man, like Mr. Seward's, were devoted to the cause of 
freedom. With the same powerful indignation against 
injustice that had impelled him in the Ohio fugitive- 
slave cases, he fought the advance of the slave power, 
and also with the same apparent certainty of defeat ; 
for the compromise measures of 1850, and the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise in 1854, seemed at the time 
to be permanent gains for slavery. 
, As his senatorial term grew toward a close, the Re- 
publican party had risen into existence, developing 
from the Free -soil party as that had grown from 
the Liberty party. The new party in 1855 nom- 



CHASE. 151 

inated and elected liim Governor of Ohio, in -which 
office he served for two consecutive terms, with great 
dignity, judgment, energy, and consistency to his prin- 
cij)les. During the first of these terms, in 1856, he de- 
clined to become a candidate for the Presidential nom- 
ination, although urged by many influential friends. It 
was in 1856, also, that the Garner case occurred at Cin- 
cinati, made horribly famous by the frantic conduct of 
Margaret Garner, wdio, finding herself about to be cap- 
tured by the slave-hunters, snatched up a butcher-knife, 
declared that she would kill all her children before they 
should be carried back, and did actually kill one poor 
little girl three years old. Margaret, her liusband, and 
the rest of the party of fugitives, were secured by 
State officers, and would probably have escaped had 
not some rapid legal hocus-pocus and connivance at 
Cincinnati hurried them out of State custody into that 
of a slave-hunting United States marshal, who thrust 
them into an omnibus, guarded them wdth a force of 
five hundred special deputies, and ran them off over 
the river into Kentucky, while Governor Chase was at 
Columbus at the annual session of the Legislature. 
They disappeared into slavery, and have never been 
heard of since. 

In the next year some Kentucky deputy marshals 
went on a regular slave-hunt into Ohio, w^here they re- 
sisted the State authority, fired on the sheriff of Cham- 
paign County, escaped into Green County, resisted and 
fired on the sheriff of that county also, but finally had 
to surrender and go to jail at Xenia. They, however, 
were quickly released on habeas corpus by Judge 
Leavitt, of Cincinnati, the same person who liad so 



152 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

swiftly sent off the miserable Garners into slavery. 
This Green County case was violently asserted, by the 
political party opposed to Governor Chase, to be an 
actual armed attack by him or his friends upon the 
United States Government. This absurd charge did 
no harm. Indeed, the occurrences themselves were in- 
directly of vast benefit to the cause of freedom, though 
so inauspicious in themselves. The result of such de- 
cisions as those of this Judge Leavitt was, to assert 
that a State could not execute its civil or criminal pro- 
cess if such execution interfered with the doings of 
claimants under the Fugitive Slave Law. As no such 
claim was set up in any other case, the distinction w^s 
so invidious and so very discreditable, that it did much 
to make that law odious to the public, and to prepare 
for the overthrow of slavery. 

Mr. Chase, who had been again elected to the United 
States Senate, was a member of that " Peace Conven- 
tion" which met in Washington in consequence of the 
invitation of Virginia, given in February, 18G0. In 
this convention he was perfectly willing to assure the 
revolting States of what they already knew very well 
— that their rights were not going to be invaded — but 
he was firm in the conviction that they ought at the 
same time to be notified that slavery would not be al- 
lowed any further extension. The convention could 
not, however, resolve upon so decided a course of con- 
duct, and accomplished nothing. When threats were 
made that Mr. Lincoln should not be inaugurated un- 
less certain concessions were made by the Republican 
party, Mr. Chase responded with four words, which 
were at the time quite a rallying cry: "Inauguration 



CHASE. 153 

first, adjustment afterward." The inauguration took 
place accordingly, and Mr. Chase was appointed Secre- 
tary of the Treasury. This appointment had been of- 
fered to him by Mr. Lincoln a little after his election, 
but he had not accepted, feeling disinclined to exchange 
his senatorship for the management of a financial con- 
cern with such very doubtful and disorderly prospects 
as those of the Treasury. His nomination was, how- 
ever, sent in to the Senate, as it happened in his ab- 
sence, and was at once confirmed unanimously. On 
returning and finding what had happened, he went at 
once to Mr. Lincoln to have the work undone. But 
Mr. Lincoln insisted upon it that he must stay, and 
so did several of his most valued friends, and he con- 
sented. 

His management of the finances of the United States 
durinoj the beG^innins: and main stress of the rebellion 
was remarkably successful, and his money policy has 
been substantially followed by his successors. He raised 
by one loan after another, the money needed for the 
rapidly increasing land and sea forces of the United 
States, until the suspension of specie payment by the 
banks of the country at the end of 1861 showed 
that the end of the supply available from the existing 
financial organization of the country had been reached. 
He then carried into operation, with some difficulty and 
some resistance, the plan of issuing a legal-tender 
United States currency, and of organizing the banking 
interest so that it should be forced to use United States 
bonds as a basis of business, having its own notes 
clothed with a national character in return. These 
two arrangements, together with the skillful negotia- 



4 
154 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

tion of subsequent loans, carried the United States safe 
through the war so far as the supply of money was 
concerned, and effected something else besides. The 
plan caused the money interest — indeed, the money ex- 
istence — of the banks and the Government to be abso- 
lutely identical ; and without doubting the patriotism 
of the capitalists of the United States, it can well be 
believed that they would not feel any less interest in 
the success of a cause in which all, or almost all, their 
means were thus ingeniously invested. 

When Mr. Chase resigned the secretaryship of the 
Treasury, June 30, 1864, the work to which he had set 
his hand was either completed, or so distinctly planned 
that other hands could continue it. In the summer of 
that year he for the second time declined to allow him- 
self to be nominated for President, not wishing to head 
an opposition to Mr. Lincoln. 

On the 12th of October following died Roger B. 
Taney, Chief-Justice of the United States, and on the 
6th of December following, Mr. Lincoln appointed Mr. 
Chase to that high position. He accepted it, and now 
fills it. Mr. Lincoln had intended to make this ap- 
pointment in case of the death of the aged previous in- 
cumbent, ever since his accession to the Presidency. 
And it was one which combined in a very rare degree 
fitness of personal selection and striking poetical justice. 
It was most just that the highest legal j^lace in the 
land, so long the very impregnable citadel and arsenal 
of the slave power, the place whence issued the ungod- 
ly Bred Scott decision, should now be occupied by that 
" promising young man who had just ruined himself," 
by vainly striving to secure freedom to a miserable 



CHASE. 155 

negro girl more than a quarter of a century before, and 
who had been fighting ever since a battle seemingly 
hopeless against the doctrines and decisions which he 
was now to be able to contradict and reverse. It is 
scarcely possible to imagine a more completely perfect 
picture of a noble revenge than Salmon Portland 
Chase delivering judgments on the side of freedom from 
the chair of Roger Brooke Taney. 



156 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 



Yn. 

CALEB BLOOD SMITH. 

Secretary Smith, of the Interior, appears in Mr. 
Carpenter's picture as the tall and personable gentle- 
man who stands behind the table, at Mr. Lincoln's left 
hand. With liim is the thin and upright form of Mr. 
Blair, Postmaster-General. Caleb Blood Smith was a 
native of Massachusetts, having been born in Boston, 
April IG, 1808. When he was a boy of six, his parents 
removed to Cincinnati, Ohio, which was in that day " The 
Far West." Young Smith went through college in 
Ohio, beginning his course at Cincinnati College, and 
graduating at Miami University, and after studying 
law was admitted to the bar and opened an office at 
Connersville, Indiana. Hon. O. H. Smith, himself sub- 
sequently United States senator from Indiana, was the 
lawyer with whom the future Secretary studied. He 
thus relates their first interview, and his opinions of liis 
student. 

" One day I was sitting in my office at Connersville, when 
there entered a small youth, about live feet eight inches high, 
large head, thin brown hair, light blue eyes, high, capacious 
forehead and good features, and introduced himself as Caleb B. 
Smith, from Cincinnati. He stated his business in a lisping 
tone. He had come to read law with me if I would receive 
him. I assented to his wishes, and he remained with me until 
he was admitted to practice, and commenced his professional 
as well as political career at Connersville. He rose rapidly at 



SMITH. 157 

the bar, was remarkably fluent, rapid, and eloquent before the 
jury, never at a loss for ideas or words to express them; if he 
had a fault as an advocate, it was that he suffered his nature to 
press forward his ideas, for utterance faster than the minds of 
the jurors were prepared to receive them ; still, he was very 
successful before the court and jury. He was one of the most 
eloquent and powerful speakers in the United States." 

Mr. Smith early turned his attention to political life, 
and became an influential member of the Whig party 
in Indiana, serving in the Legislature of that State dur- 
ing the four consecutive years from 1833 to 1836, and 
being Speaker of the House in 1835 and 1838. In 1840 
he was one of the Whig electors who voted for General 
Harrison for President, and during his State political 
career he also held the responsible financial public 
office of State Fund Commissioner for Indiana. He 
was a member of Congress from the fourth district of 
the State during that interesting period from 1843 to 
1847, being the last part of Mr. Tyler's administra- 
tion and the first part of Mr. Polk's, when the Oregon 
question, with its alliterative Avar-cry of "Fifty-four 
forty, or fight !" stirred tlie country up so thoroughly 
about England, and when the annexation of Texas and 
the subsequent Mexican war showed so plainly how 
bold, how large, and how dishonest were the plans in 
operation to " extend the area of freedom" for the use 
of slavery. Mr. Smith's course in Congress was one of 
creditable and consistent co-operation with his party. 
His efficiency as a working member caused him to be 
appointed after the war as Commissioner of the Board 
for adjusting war-claims against Mexico ; and having 
completed this task, he established himself at Cmcin- 
nati in the practice of the law. 



158 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

When the Republican party "^vas organized, Mr. 
Smith joined it, and was on the Ohio Fremont electoral 
ticket in 1856. Two years later, in 1858, he removed, 
again to Indianapolis, and was there in practice at the 
bar when appointed by Mr. Lincoln Secretary of the 
Interior. This office was originally suggested in the 
session of 1848-9, by Mr. R. J. Walker, then Secretaiy 
of the Treasury, who found his own hands overloaded 
with work. It includes the care of Patents, Public 
Lands, the accounts of U. S. Marshals and other law 
officers, Indian Affairs, Pensions, the Census, Public 
Buildings, etc., being a department for the home and 
domestic business of the. United States. The law 
creating it was passed March 3, 1849, and Hon. Thomas 
Ewing was the first Secretary. Mr. Smith had long 
been a political and personal friend of Mr. Lincoln, and 
was appointed with full knowledge of his fitness for the 
place. 

In this responsible and important trust Secretary 
Smith labored steadily and. successfully, until his ap- 
pointment to be U. S. Judge for the District of Indi- 
ana, which was confirmed by the Senate, December 22, 
1862; and he was succeeded in his place at Washing- 
ton by Hon. John P. Usher, also an Indianian, Jan. 8, 
1863. Judge Smith died only a few- months after his 
appointment, leaving an unspotted personal and official 
reputation. 



WELLES. 159 

yni. 

GIDEON WELLES. 

The grave, reflective features, long beard, and "wig 
of Secretary Welles are familiar to most persons, so 
extensively has his portrait been placed before the pub- 
lic, either in earnest or in jest. In Mr. Carpenter's 
picture he sits beyond the table, at Mr. Lincoln's left 
hand, between him and the group of Messrs. Smith, 
Blair, and Bates. 

Mr. Welles descends from one of the oldest Puritan 
stocks, beinor the sixth in direct descent from Thomas 
Welles, Governor of Connecticut in 1655 and 1658. 
The Secretary's brother, Thaddeus, still occupies the 
,same farm in Glastenbury which their ancestor the Pu- 
ritan Governor bought of Sowheag, the great Indian 
sachem at Middletown, two hundred years ago. This 
is a long time, in a country of cheap conveyances of 
land, for real estate to remain in the same family. Mr. 
Welles' father lived to be 80 ; his grandfather to be 
Id ; his great-grandfather to be 86 ; and the next an- 
cestor back to be 72. The wives of these stout old 
gentlemen lived to about the same age; so that the 
Secretary has a sort of inherited right to live long. 

The father of the Secretary was a thrifty and re- 
spectable Glastenbury farmer, and gave his son a good 
education. The boy, after some experience in the dis- 
trict school, was sent to the Episcopal Academy at 
Che^ire, near New Haven, and afterward to Norwich 



160 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

University, Yerraont, which was first established as a 
military school, in 1820, by Captain Alden Partridge, 
the well-known soldier and teacher. For some reason 
or other, however, young ^yelles did not graduate there, 
brrt returned to his native State and established him- 
self in Hartford, which has remained his residence ever 
since, except at the two periods when he has held office 
in Washington. Here he studied law under Chief- 
Justice Williams and Judge W. W. Ellsworth. But his 
natural inclination was much stronger toward politics 
and political literature than toward the more plodding 
legal industry of the courts ; and not having become 
very deeply immersed in the practice of law, he found 
it easy and agreeable, in 1826, to become a proprietor 
and the editor of the Hartford Tlmes^ a paper which, 
whether its politics have been right or wrong, has al- 
ways been conducted with shrewdness, energ}^ and 
power, and is so still. It was when Mr. Welles became 
connected with it the recognized organ of the Demo- 
cratic party in Connecticut, and it is an influential 
organ of that party now. 

As editor of the Thnes, or as a principal writer for 
it, Mr. Welles exerted a powerful influence in the poli- 
tics of his State, and to some extent in national poli- 
tics. This influence was in great measure exerted in 
consultation with Hon. John M. Niles, for three terms 
United States senator from Connecticut, and in his day 
the leader of his party in his State. So complete was 
his control over the Democracy supposed to be, that 
" Niles's cattle" was one of the regular sneers almost 
every day cast at the " Locofocos" by their Whig ad- 
versaries. It was Mr. Niles who was foremost in es- 



WELLES. 161 

tablishing the Times ^ in 1817, and until Mr. Welles 
took his place he was principal editor. 

Messrs. Niles and AVelles were both devoted parti- 
sans of General Jackson, and the Times was tlie first 
newspaper that urged his election to the Presidency of 
the United States ; it stuck to him through evil and 
good report until his election in 1828, and was a most 
thorough and effective supporter of his administration 
from beginning to end. 

In 1827 Mr. Welles was elected to the State Legisla- 
ture, and was re-elected yearly until 1835 ; and as he 
resigned his editorial chair at the end of General Jack- 
son's second term, his chief activity as a State legis- 
tor and politician may perhaps be, placed within that 
period of eight years. During this time he was a most 
vigorous adversary to a scheme then proposed to pro- 
hibit from giving evidence in courts persons not be- 
lieving in a future state of rewards and punishments ; 
he labored perseveringly to abolish imprisonment for 
debt, which he finally succeeded in doing ; he advo- 
cated and carried the enactment of general laws for 
the establishment of business corporations, in place of 
the previous practice of legislating specially for each 
new company ; and in the days when a silver quarter of 
a dollar was the postage on " each sheet or piece of 
paper," and long before the public at large were think- 
ing about it, he set on foot an important agitation for 
cheap and uniform postage. The mere statement of 
these " heads of controversy" shows the genuine " dem- 
ocracy" in the real, not the partisan political sense of 
the word, of Mr. Welles' views. 

In 1835 Mr. Welles was controller of public ac- 
11 



162 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

counts of the State; in 1836- he was made postmaster 
at Hartford, and retained the office until removed 
under Harrison's administration in 1841 ; in 1842 he 
was controller again; and in 184G, President Polk, 
without any previous notice, offered liim an appoint- 
ment as Chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Cloth- 
ing in the Navy Department at Washington. This 
office he accepted, and retained until 1849. 

Mr. Welles, as a Democrat, had always been an ad- 
mirer of Jeffi?rson, and in. accordance with the views 
of that statesman, he was unconditionally opposed to» 
the extension of slave territory. When, therefore, the 
annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the contest 
over Mr. Clay's compromise, and the other measures 
connected with these, showed that the Democratic 
party was ceasing to be the progressive party and be- 
coming a retrogressive one — was changing from the 
party of human rights into a machine for promoting 
slavery, he necessarily felt himself repelled from it — a 
feeling, by the way, in which liis old friend Senator 
Niles most fully sympathized. Both of them., although 
they had not united with the Liberty party nor the 
Free-soil party, joined heartily in the organization of 
the Republican party in 1855; Mr. Welles was the 
candidate of the new party for Governor of Connecti- 
cut in 1856 ; and on the establishment in the same year 
of the Hartford Emning Press as the organ of the new 
party, he transferred his counsels and his pen to the 
new paper. He was soon appointed a member of the 
Republican National Committee, and at the Chicago 
Convention in 18C0 which nominated Mr. Lincoln, Mr. 
Welles was chairman of the Connecticut delegation. 



V/ELLES. 163 

During Mr. Lincoln's tour in the East, in the beginning 
of ISGO, Mr. Welles was much with him; and doubt- 
less may then have formed such an opinion of his Con- 
necticut companion as induced the subsequent selection 
of him for Secretary of the Navy. The writer of the 
present sketch very well remembers being in the State 
Library at Hartford one day when Mr. Welles and 
Mr. Lincoln entered together, and smiling to see the tall 
form of Mr. Welles so effectually out-topped by the 
lengthy Illinoian. It was not then generally foreseen 
that Mr. Lincoln would be President, Mr. Seward being 
the choice more usually expected ; and yet it is not 
improbable that the experienced campaigner of the 
times of Jackson and Van Buren may already have 
speculated, in his own peculiarly silent and quiet man- 
ner, upon the chances of Illinois as against New York. 
And if Illinois were to be the nominating State, it fol- 
lowed of course that Mr. Lincoln would be the man. 
Be that as it may, Mr. Welles was appointed Secretary 
of the Navy, and was retained in that place by Mr. 
Lincoln's successor. His administration of his very im- 
portant trust has been often assailed for a variety of 
reasons. Whatever the occasion or the violence of those 
attacks, Mr. Welles has answered none of them. This 
is not the place for any discussion of such matters ; but 
it may properly be remarked that the United States 
Navy during the rebellion was of gigantic size and 
importance, far beyond comparison with its condition 
at any previous period ; and further, that its growth, ef- 
ficiency, economy, and good managenient under Mr. 
Welles will bear comparison with those of any other 
department of the Government during the same period. 



164 THE PICTUKE AKD THE MEN. 

IX. 
EDWIN M. STANTON. 

Mr. St^vxton was the youngest man of President 
Lincoln's cabinet, having been born at Steubenville, 
Ohio, in 1815. His family, like those of Mr. Lincoln 
and Attorney-General Bates, was of Quaker descent. 
His parents had removed to Ohio from Culpepper 
County, Virginia, where his mother's father once 
owned the ground on which was fought the battle of 
Cedar Moimtain, August 9, 1862, between Banks and 
Stonewall Jackson. After an ordinary preparatory 
training, he entered Kenyon College in 1833, but re- 
mained only a year ; after that time he became a 
bookseller's clerk at Columbus, Ohio, but at the same 
time studied law under L. J). Collier, Esq., and was 
admitted to the bar in 1836. He began practice -at 
Cadiz, in Hamson County, and almost immediately at- 
tracted attention as a lawyer of ability. In the next 
year, 1837, he was chosen prosecuting attorney of the 
county. Soon afterwards he established himself in 
Steubenville, where he rery quickly attained an exten- 
sive business. In 1839 he became official reporter of 
the decisions of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and so re- 
mained during three years. By this time Mr. Stanton's 
reputation was very high throughout all southeast Ohio 
and the neighboring part of Virginia, both for arguing 
questions of law and for power in convincing juries. 
While established here, he went to Washington to de- 



BT ANTON. 165 

fend C. J. McNulty, of Ohio, clerk of the House of 
Representatives, on trial upon a charge of embezzle- ^^ 
nient in office, and succeeded in securing his acquittal. 

While thus at wo^*k in his profession, he was also an 
4'nergetic and efficient politician, laboring vigorously in 
the ranks of the Democratic party. In 1848, as his * 
reputation caused him to be employed in more and 
more important causes, he removed to Pittsburg, as a 
better center of operations, and remained until 1857. 
Here Mr. Stanton speedily became the acknowledged 
leader of the bar, and began to be employed in many 
heavy and important cases before the United States 
Supreme Court at \Yashington. One of these, the 
Wheeling Bridge case, involved the same important 
and violently and repeatedly contested question that 
lias frequently arisen in similar cases, whether the con- 
venience of the land routes or of the water routes shall 
be served, when a bridge is wanted over a navigable 
stream. No lawsuits are fought with more energy, 
anger, and force than these. This fact is easy to 
understand when it is considered that they necessarily 
occur between parties of large means, and of that pe- 
culiar obstinate, powerful, aggressive executive energy 
of character that belongs to the promoters of great in- 
dustrial and social enterprises. Mr. Stanton's vast en-' 
dowment of exactly those qualities rendered him a 
sympathetic and interested lawyer for just such men ; 
and his argument in the Wheeling case is perhaps the 
best known of all his legal efforts. 

In 1857, Mr. Stanton removed again from Pittsburg 
to the still larger arena of Washington, where he 
quickly entered into the peculiar and lucrative patent 



IGG THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

deiDartmeiit of law practice. During the year after bis 
removal to Washington, he was selected by Attorney- 
General Black to go to California to argue for the 
United States some land cases involving principles and 
values of very great importance, which came up before 
the California State courts. 

Late in the year 1860, after the secession of South 
Carolina, great difficulties and vexations arose within 
the Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, from the operation of the 
existing political troubles, and from the clashing views, 
purposes, and characters of the members of the Govern- 
ment. Hon. Lewis Cass, then Secretary of State, un- 
able to control the course of events or to endure the 
machinations of the dishonest officials around him, re- 
signed his place on the 14th of December, and Attorney- 
General Black was appointed in his stead. Mr. Stanton, 
well known hitherto as a Democrat in politics, and as 
a prompt, energetic, and able lawyer, was appointed to 
the vacant post of Attorney-General, and as such he 
bore a part in the disturbed and uneasy remainder of 
Mr. Buchanan's administration. The details of this 
portion of his career are known only to himself and his 
fellow-members of the Cabinet. But he took a strong 
and determined position in defence of the United States, 
and of the dignities and rights of the central govern- 
ment, as against the feeble and wailing acquiescence of 
Mr. Buchanan, and one or two of the Cabinet, and 
against the monstrous and impudent treasons of the 
rest of it. In a conversation with Mr. Carpenter, Mr. 
Stanton once gave the following brief glimpse into that 
sufficiently contemptible interior : 

" This little incident," said Stanton, speaking of Major 



STANTON. 1G7 

Anderson's removal to Fort Sumter, " was the crisis of 
our history — the pivot upon which everything turned. 
Had he remained in Fort Moultrie, a very different com- 
bination of t'ircumstances would have arisen. The at- 
tack on Sumter — commenced by the South — united the 
ISTorth, and made the success of the Confederacy impossi- 
ble. I shall never forget," he continued, " our coming 
together by special summons that night. Buchanan sat 
in his arm-chair in a corner of the room, white as a 
sheet, with the stump of a cigar in his mouth. The 
dispatches v»^ere laid before us ; and so much violence 
ensued, tliat he had to turn us all out-of-doors." 

Upon Mr. Lincoln's accession, Mr. Cameron was ap- 
pointed Secretary of War; and upon his resigning. 
January 14, 1862, to accept the appointment of envoy 
extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Russia, 
Mr. Stanton was appointed to the vacant secretaryship 
on the 20th of the same month. It was with a just 
consciousness of his powers of straightforward hard 
work, of judicious organization, and of selecting and 
controlling men, that he accepted the place, yet witli 
no vain-glory, nor with any idle under-estimate of the 
problem to be solved. He had not been a member of 
the Republican party, but a thorough Jacksonian 
Democrat. Still, Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, and Mr.. 
Cameron himself were all well aware of the remarkable 
enei-gy, fearlessness, force of will, and unqualified pa- 
triotism shown in his position in the Buchanan Cabinet. 
They knew that he, with Judge Holt and General Dix, 
had substantially preserved the Government ; that had 
it not been for those three men, doubtless the whole 
frame of the administration would liave been knocked 



168 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

out of the trembling and feeble hands of Mr. Buchanan, 
to be broken into splinters, or to be grasped and con- 
trolled by the Southern traitors of that Cabinet. When 
Mr. Stanton went to the White House to receive his 
commission from Mr. Lincoln, the President and he had 
never seen each other. It is said also that Mr. Stanton 
liad no notice whatever of the intended appointment 
until the day before his nomination was sent to the 
Senate, the information being given to him just as he 
was about to argue a cause before the Supreme Court. 
In a brief article on Mr. Stanton which appeared some 
time ago in Harper's Weekly^ and which is understood 
to have been written by an intimate personal arid po- 
litical friend, the writer says: "The relations thus com- 
menced between the President and the Secretary of 
War always remained exceedingly cordial, or rather, 
they constantly became warmer and more confidential, 
down to the last fatal day Avhich ended Mr. Lincoln's 
earthly career. While he was rarely seen at the offices 
of the other executive departments, at the War Office 
he was not merely a frequent but a constant visitor. 
His tall form, wrapped in his familiar gray shawl, was 
usually to be seen making its way along the back alley 
that leads there from the White House, at from nine to 
ten o'clock in the morning, or about four in the afternoon ; 
and persons who were admitted to see the Secretary on 
important business in his private room at those hours 
would sometimes find the President stretched upon the 
sofa there, as if the discussion between him and the 
Secretary had not yet been concluded. Indeed, the tie 
between them seemed to be quite as much that of 
private affection as of official duty ; and when the catas- 



STANTON. 169 

trophe occurred which robed the nation in mourning, 
all will remember how admirably the confidence of the 
deceased statesman in his friend and adviser wixs justi- 
fied by the latter. For a brief time, in that awful 
crisis, the w^hole government seemed to rest upon the 
shoulders of the Secretary of War, and the country Avill 
not soon forget the manner in which the momentous 
trust was discharged." 

Mr. Lincoln, besides proceeding upon the recommen- 
dations of the other secretaries, chose Mr. Stanton with 
a wise consideration of geography. In answering some 
questions on the subject, he observed that his first Avisli 
had been to choose a man from a border State, but 
that he knew New England would object ; that on the 
other hand he would have also been glad to choose a 
New Encclander, but he knew the Border States would 
object. So, on the whole, he concluded to select from 
some intervening territory ; " and to tell you the truth, 
gentlemen," he added, " I don't believe Stanton knows 
where he belongs himself" Some of the company now 
said something about Mr. Stanton's impulsiveness, to 
which Mr. Lincoln replied w4th one of those queer stories 
with which he used to answer friends and enemies alike. 
" Well," he said, " Ave may have to treat him as they 
are sometimes oblicred to treat a Methodist minister I 
know of out West. He gets wrought up so high in 
his prayers and exhortations that they are obliged to 
put bricks in his pockets to keep him dow^n. We may 
be obliged to serve Stanton the same way, but I guess 
we'll let him jump aw^hile first !" 

An interesting anecdote was a short time since print- 
ed in the Cincinnati Gazette^ illustrating well the com- 



170 THE PICTURE AND THE MEN. 

pletc confidence existing between the President and liis 
Secretary of War. 

" While the President," says this account, " was on 
liis way back from Richmond, and at a point where no 
telegraph conld reach the steamer npon which he was, 
a dispatch of the utmost importance reached Washing- 
ton, demanding the immediate decision of the President 
himself. The dispatch was received by a confidential 
staff officer, wdio at once ascertained that My. Lincoln 
could not be reached. Delay was out of the question, 
as important army movements vrere involved. The 
officer having the dispatch went with it directly to Mr. 
Stanton's office, but the Secretary could not be found. 
Messengers were hastily dispatched for him in all direc- 
tions. Their search was useless, and a positive answer 
had been already too much delayed by the time it had 
occupied. With great reluctance the staff officer sent 
a reply in the President's name. Soon after Mr. Stan- 
ton entered himself, having learned of the efforts made 
to find him. The dispatch was produced, and he was 
informed by the officer sending the ansv/er, of what had 
been done. 

" 'Did I do right?' said the officer to the Secretary. 

" ' Yes, Major,' replied Mr. Stanton, ' I think you 
have sent the correct reply, but I should hardly have 
dared to take the responsibility.' 

" At this the whole magnitude of the office, and the 
great responsibility he had taken upon himself, seemed 
to fall upon the officer, and almost overcame him, and 
he asked Mr. Stanton what he had better do, and was 
advised to go directly to the President, on his return, 
and state the case frankly to him. It was a sleepless 



STANTON. 171 

night for tins officer, and at the very earliest honr con- 
sistent with propriety he went to the White House, 
Mr. Lincoln having returned late the night before, but 
was refused admission by the usher, who told him that 
the President had given strict orders to admit no one 
upon any pretense till after a certain hour. In vain 
did the officer urge the importance of his errand ; the 
usher w^ould not take in his name, and he was about 
turning away wdien the President's son came down 
stairs, bade the officer good-morning, and, on hearing 
he had been refused admission, said that his father 
vrould certainly see the Major. Still the usher w^as not 
to be moved, till the son went back himself, and re- 
turned with the message that the President would see 
him. 

" Mr. Lincoln was reclining on a lounge as the officer 
entered, looking over a pile of papers. He appeared 
a little annoyed at the interruption, but stopped at 
once to hear his visitor's mission. The dispatch was 
shown liim, and the action upon it stated frankly and 
briefly. The President thought a moment and then 
said, 'Did you consult the Secretary of War, Major?' 
The absence of the Secretary at the imj)ortant moment 
■svas then related to Mr. Lincoln, with the subsequent 
remark of Mr. Stanton that he thought the right answer 
had been given, but that he himself would have slu'unk 
from the responsibility. 

" Mr. Lincoln, on hearing the story, rose, crossed the 
room, and taking the officer by the hand thanked him 
cordially, and then spoke earnestly of Mr. Stanton as 
follows: 'Hereafter, Major, xchenever you have 3Ir. 
Stanton^ s sanction in any matter^ you have mine, for 



172 THE PICTUEE AND THE MEN. 

SO great is my confidence in his judgment and patriot- 
ism.^ that I never wish to take an important step my- 
self without first coyisxdting him^ " 

The story of life Avithin the Cabinet during the war 
is varied Avith all manner of friendly and unfriendly 
colorings ; but on the whole it is a fine picture of 
strong and decided men striving to do their best for 
the country, and to postpone or reconcile personal ob- 
jects and sentiments so far as they interfered with the 
common object. Very many of its inside occurrences 
have all the hearty friendliness of events in a family 
of grown-up, positive, but kindly brothers. Mr. Car- 
penter tells a graphic anecdote of the strong regard of 
Mr. Lincoln for Secretary Stanton. " A few days be- 
fore the President's death," he says, " Secretary Stan- 
ton tendered his resignation of the War Department. 
He accompanied the act with a heart-felt tribute to Mr. 
Lincoln's constant friendship and faithful devotion to 
the country ; saying, also, that he as Secretary had ac- 
cepted the position to hold it only until the war should 
end, and that now he felt his work was done, and his 
duty was to resign. 

" Mr. Lincoln was greatly moved by the Secretary's 
words, and tearing in pieces the paper containing the 
resignation, and throwing his arms about the Secretary, 
he said : * Stanton, you have been a good friend and a 
faithful public servant, and it is not for you to say 
when you will no longer be needed here.' Several 
friends of both parties were present on the occasion, 
and there was not a dry eye that witnessed the scene." 

At the Cabinet meeting which Mr. Carpenter once 
attended, Mr. Usher, then Secretary of the Interior, 



BTANTON. 173 

told Mr. Stanton that he had a young friend whom he 
wished to have appointed a paymaster in the army. 
" How old is he ?" asked Mr. Stanton, griiffiy. " About 
twenty-one, I believe," ansv/ered Mr. Usher; " he is of 
good fiimily and excellent character. "Usher," ex- 
claimed Mr. Stanton, in reply, " I would not appoint the 
Angel Gabriel a j^aymaster if he was only twenty-one." 

A good instance of the kind of influence which Mr. 
Stanton exerted upon the v/ar, and of the way he used 
it, is given in the account of a correspondent of the 
Boston Coinmonwealth^ of the occasion when negotia- 
tion upon political matters was forbidden to General 
Grant. It was at the capital, on the night of March 
3d, 1865, and while the last bills from Congress were 
being read and signed, and the accounts from Grant of 
the certain speedy destruction of Lee's army were be- 
ing discussed, that, the story says, " Mr. Lincoln was 
elated, and the kindness of his heart was manifest in 
intimations of favorable terms to be granted to the 
conquered rebels. 

" Stanton listened in silence, restraining his emotion, 
but at length the tide burst forth. *Mr. President,' 
said he, ' to-morrow is inauguration day. If you are 
not to be the President of an obedient and united peo- 
ple, you had better not be inaugurated. Your work is 
already done, if any other authority than yours is for 
one moment to be recognized, or any terms made tKat 
do not signify you are the supreme head of the nation. 
If generals in the field are to negotiate peace, or any 
other chief magistrate is to be acknowledged on this 
continent, then you are not needed, and you had better 
not take the oath of office.' 



174: THE PICTUF.C AND THE MEN. 

" ' Stanton, you arc right !' said the President, his 
whole tone changing. ' Let me have a pen.' 

" Mr. Lincoln sat down at the table, and wrote as 
follows : 

" ' The President directs rae to say to yon that he 
wishes you to have no conference with General Lee, 
unless it be for the capitulation of Lee's army, or on 
some minor or purely military matter. He instructs 
me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer 
upon any political question. Such questions the Presi- 
dent holds in his own hands, and will submit them to 
no military conferences or conventions. In the mean 
time you are to press to the utmost your military ad- 
vantages.' 

" The President read over what he had written, and 
then said : 

" ' Now, Stanton, date and sign this paper, and send 
it to Grant. We'll see about this peace business.' 

" The duty was discharged only too gladly by the 
energetic and far-sighted Secretary; with what effect 
and renown the country knows full well." 

Mr. Stanton's official doings as Secretary of War 
have been very often and A'ery violently attacked, and 
charges of every sort, from oj^pression, cruelty, and 
official brutality to the grossest and vilest malfeas- 
ance and corruption, have been made against him. 
Xonc of these, however, have ever lived long enough to 
produce an impression upon the public, and Mr. Stan- 
ton himself has treated them with utter neglect. This 
disregard of cotemporary personal reputation was a 
habit of liis before he became Secretary ; for he never 
took pains to preserve any of his legal productions, and 



the personal friend who prepjired the sketch of Mr. 
Stanton, above quoted from, says : " In one of these 
cases, which related to the riglit of the Suspension 
Bridge Company, at Wheeling, to construct their 
bridge across the Ohio River, his plea is spoken of by 
those who had the luck to hear it as a most remarkable 
performance, but we have not succeeded in procuring a 
printed copy of it." 

We quote from the same paper its very w^ell-outlin- 
cd sketch of Mr. Stanton's personal appearance : 

*' Mr. Stanton is about five feet eight inches in height, 
and is a person of broad shoulders and heavy frame. 
His features are rather round and full, his hair very 
dark, though thin, and his complexion sallow. These 
peculiarities, combined with his intense and penetrating 
dark browm ("yes, and his heavj^ beard sprinkled freely 
with gray, give somewhat of an Oriental air to his 
general appearance. Though his ordinary expression 
is thoughtful, absorbed, and stern, his smile is gentle 
and winning as a woman's." 

In an enthusiastic account of the Secretary of War, 
printed some time ago in the Illinois State Journal^ is 
given the following picture of his character as a busi- 
ness man : " His mind never ceases to act, and his body 
is never fatigued with executing. The former never 
rests, and the latter never bends beneath its work. The 
writer, when a boy, used to study in a room under his 
office, and knows that he was accustomed to work all 
day and until the small hours of the niglit began their 
increase. His industry would astonish ordinary men, 
and the amount of work which he did could never have 
been endured "by other than a man of iron. When im- 



ITG THE pictCke and the men. 

mersed in business and surrounded by a multitude of 
details he seemed at home — confusion under his energy 
soon became system. He seemed always posted in his 
business, he never took up a wrong paper, turned to a 
wrong page, or read a wrong extract. His memory 
never deserted him, and his judgment never erred." 

Mr. Stanton has been twice married, his present wife 
having been a Miss Ellen Dickinson of Pittsburg. By 
his first marriage he has a son, now about twenty-five 
years of age ; and by his second, a son and two daugh- 
ters, all yet quite young. 



177 



X 
EDWARD BATES. 

Judge Bates was born in Goochland County, Vir- 
ginia — a county in the heart of the State, on the north 
bank of James River, and next above Henrico, in which 
stands the city of Richmond — in 1793. His family had 
been Quakers, but his father, after the fashion of the 
sect, had been cast out of it for bearing arms during the 
Revolution. The education of the boy was conducted 
under the supervision of a relative of much culture ; and 
about 1814 he removed to Missouri in company with 
his elder brother, Frederick, appointed Secretary of the 
Territory under the well-known Western explorer Gov- 
ernor William Clark, and afterward in 1824 himself 
elected Governor of the State. St. Louis, where the 
young man established himself, was then a town of less 
than 5,000 inhabitants, and the whole Territory num 
bered not more than about 50,000 souls. 

Mr. Bates very soon became- eminent as a lawyer 
possessing excellent judgment, ample knowledge, and 
much power of calm and deliberate argument. When, 
on July 19, 1820, the convention to frame a State con- 
stitution met at St. Louis, Mr. Bates was an influential 
member of it, and was for a lonj; time a leadinsj mem- 
ber of the Territorial and afterward of the State Leg- 
islature. During the Twentieth Congress, 1827-9, he 
served as a representative in Con stress from Missouri. 

12 



ITS THE riCTUPwE AND TUB MEN. 

Mr. Bates found political life well suited to his tastes 
and acquirements, but the state of his private fortune 
did not allow him to pursue such a career, and accord- 
ingly at the end of his Congressional term he went 
quietly home to his law practice in St. Louis. Here he 
labored faithfully and obscurely, well known within his 
own State, but very little out of it, until the Internal 
ImprovementConvention of 1847, which met at Chicago. 
To this assembly Mr. Bates was a delegate, and here 
he astonished the Convention by delivering a speech 
upon the question before them, so powerful, eloquent, 
and conclusive, as to fill his audience Avith surprise and 
delight. An attempt was quickly made to enlist so 
much ability in the service of the Whig party ; but 
Mr. Bates persistently declined either to accept any 
State office, or to take the Secretaryship which Presi- 
dent Fillmore offered him. 

On questions of national policy Mr. Bates was a fol- 
lower of Henry Clay. On the subject of slavery he 
had excellent opportunities for forming his opinions, as 
the admission of his State to the Union was the occa- 
sion of the Missouri Compromise. The debates attend- 
ing that measure had powerfully discussed the subject, 
and it had naturally been considered and argued fully 
within the State whose existence as a State was brought 
into question. Mr. Bates was by natural constitution of 
mind a conservative, but he was also a fearless and just 
man. While he was far from holding the views of the 
political abolitionists, he was still decidedly an emanci- 
pationist of the school of Henry Clay ; and he exempli- 
fied his beliefs on the subject by manumitting his own 
slaves. When the question of the repeal of the Mis- 



BATES. 1T9 

souri Compromise came up, he was energetic and thor- 
ough in his opposition to it ; and from that time for- 
ward he labored for the party of freedom in Missouri, 
taking the ground that free labor was right in itself, 
and was far more profitable to the State. Pie was also 
a firm opponent of the whole series of measures pursued 
by Mr. Buchanan's administration toward the infant 
State of Kansas. 

At the Chicago Convention to nominate a Republican 
candidate for the Presidency, in 1860, Mr. Bates was 
the favorite candidate of many members, both from 
the West and East. Upon Mr. Lincoln's election, Mr. 
Bates' appointment to the place of Attorney-General 
was the very first of the Cabinet appointments defi- 
nitely determined upon. His course while a Cabinet 
officer was marked by entire personal good feeling 
toward Mr. Lincoln, and by a steady and cautious offi- 
cial conservatism ; while his earnest and resolute Union- 
ism was never doubted nor questioned. After Mr. Lin- 
coln's re-election, Mr. Bates resigned his post, as he had 
once before retired from political life, for reasons j^er- 
sonal to himself, and not in accordance with any desire 
of Mr. Lincoln's, and once more returned to his home 
at St. Louis, where he has since remained in private 
life. 



180 THE nCTURE) AND THE MEN. 



XL 
MONTGOMERY BLAIR. 

Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair is in the 
tliird generation of his family who have been prominent 
in political life. About the year 1800, in the days of 
the violent political warfare between the Federalists 
and the Republicans, and when Kentucky was still 
harassed along her borders by the Indians, whose war- 
fare had given it the name of "The Dark and Bloody 
Ground," James Blair, a Virginian of Scotch descent, 
was living at Abingdon, Washington County, Vir- 
ginia, a small town in the southwestern comer of that 
State, on the head waters of the Holston River, and in 
the district so well known during the war for the 
Union, as the scene of one of those adventurous and 
damaging cavalry raids which struck so sharply and 
deeply into the heart of the rebellion. Mr. Blair re- 
moved to Kentucky, taking with him a son, Francis 
Preston Blair, then about ten years old. Mr. James 
Blair became an influential politician, and was at one 
time Attorney-general of Kentucky. 

Francis P. Blair, the son, was educated at Transyl- 
vania University, and was a partisan of Henry Clay in 
1824, but soon afterward became an advocate of Gen- 
eral Jackson's views. 

In the winter of 1830-1, President Jackson discov- 
ered that the leading party "organ," the Telegraphy 



BLAIR. 181 

though still professedly his advocate, was about to go 
over to the side of Mr. Calhoun, who was then just ap- 
pearing in Congress as the leader of the nullification 
scheme. During the previous summer, a gentleman 
had casually shown the President an article in the 
Frankfort Argus, a Kentucky paper, containing a 
strong review of a late nullification speech in Congress. 
The President, much pleased with the power of the 
article, had mquired who wrote it, and was told, Mr. 
Francis P. Blair. When, therefore, he found out the 
proposed desertion of his allies of the Telegraph, he 
caused a proposition to be made to the Kentuckian, to 
come and establish a Jackson paper in Washington. 
Mr. Blair, holding a well-paid position as elerk of the 
Kentucky Circuit Court, being also the president of the 
Commonwealth Bank with a salary, and owning also a 
good plantation, had supposed himself permanently 
established, and was entirely taken by surprise by this 
application. Being, however, an ardent friend of Gen- 
eral Jackson^s policy, he very soon gave up his Ken- 
tucky interests, came to Washington, and established 
that famous ncAvspaper the Globe. John C. Rives 
was soon afterward associated with him in the manaGre- 
ment of the new paper ; and the important part which 
it played under their management in the disturbed and 
violent political contests of thirty years ago is matter 
of history. The Congressional Globe, a sort of suc- 
cessor of the Globe, is still regularly issued at Wash- 
ington; and the important though unobtrusive influ- 
ence exerted by Mr. Blair both in those days and even 
down to the period of the rebellion, as a shrewd and 
trusted adviser of the manas^ers of the Democratic 



182 THE PICTURE AKD THE MEN. 

party, is perhaps as well known as the fame of the 
newspaper which he edited. 

Mr. Blair controlled the Globe until Mr. Polk became 
President, when Mr. Ritchie was put in his place. On 
being afterward urged to resume the place, he declined ; 
he also declined an offer of the mission to Spain, and 
an offer of some other diplomatic appointment for his 
son, and took up his abode at a country seat called 
Silver Spring, in Maryland, where he has resided ever 
since, busying himself with farming when not employed 
in politics. Mr. Blair supported the Van Buren or 
Free-soil Democratic movement in 1848, and the Fre- 
mont movement in 1856. 

Montgomery Blair, son of the editor of the Globe, 
was born in Kentucky, May 10, 1813. He studied at 
"West Point, where he graduated at the age of 22, and 
beinc: accordino: to custom commissioned as second 
lieutenant, he served in the Seminole war. After 
about a year's soldiering, however, he resignfed, and 
settled at St. Louis, as a lawyer, in 1837. Here he 
was prosperous in law and in politics, holding at vari- 
ous times, during the period from 1839 to 1849, the 
offices of United States District Attorney, Judge of the 
Court of Common Pleas, and Mayor of the city. In 
1852 Mr. Blair removed to Maryland, where he estab- 
lished himself in his father's neighborhood, in a house 
called Montgomery Castle. 

Mr. Blair, like his father, was a Jacksonian Demo- 
crat; but when the Missouri Compromise was repealed 
he cast in his lot with the Republican party. Upon 
this. President Buchanan promptly removed him from 
the solicitorship of the Court of Claims, a post given 



BLAIR. 183 

liim by Mr. Pierce. Mr. Blair, like his father and 
brother, is a thorough politician, and also like them is 
a man of strong and unconditional likes and dislikes, 
and prompt and decided in action. Moreover, the 
father and the two sons very naturally and properly 
co-operated with each other in advice, influence, and 
management. Accordingly, they were all more or less 
interested in the appointment of General Fremont to 
Missouri, and afterward in his removal. 3Ir. Mont- 
gomery Blair and his brother F. P. Blair had both 
been active and influential St. Louis politicians also, 
and thus they were pretty intimately mixed up with 
the peculiarly turbulent and passionate politics of Mis- 
souri and Kansas during the war. These experiences 
necessarily procured them enemies, and these enemies 
worked hard to procure Mr. Blair's ejection from the 
postmastership. So much hostile feeling at last grew 
up w^ithin the Kepublican party on the subject, that Mr. 
Blair, with correct and manly feeling, requested Mr. 
Lincoln to tell him when to resign, and he would do so. 
The President accordingly requested it, September 23, 
1864, and the resignation was offered and accepted ac- 
cordingly. The correspondence is so creditable to both 
parties, and so brief, that we give it in full : 

Executive Mansion, Washington, September 23, 1864. 
Hon. Montgomery Blair : 

My Dear Sir : — You have generously said to me, more than 
once, that whenever your resignation could be a relief to me, 
it was at my disposal. The time has come. You very well 
know that this proceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you 
personally or officially. Your uniform kindness has been un- 
surpassed by that of any other friend, and while it is true that 
the war does not so greatly add to the difficulties of 3'our de. 



184 THE PICTUKE AND THE MEN. 

partment as to those of some others, it is yet much to say, as I 
most truly can, that in the three years and a half dm-ing which 
you have administered the General Post-Office, I remember no 
single complaint against you in connection therewith. 

Yom's, as ever, A. Llncoln. 

MR. BLAIR'S reply. 

My Dear Sir : — I have received your note of this date, refer- 
ring to my offers to resign whenever you should deem it ad- 
visable for the public interest that I should do so, and stating 
that, in your judgment, that time has now come. I now, there- 
fore, formally tender my resignation of the office of Postmas- 
ter-General. I can not take leave of you without renewing the 
expressions of my gratitude for the uniform kindness which 
has marked your course toward, 

Yours truly, M. Blair. 

TiiE President. 

The four years' term of office thus filled by Mr. Blair 
was by the nature of his occupation far less calculated 
to keep him prominently before the public, than the 
Secretaryships of ^Var, of the Navy, and of the Treas- 
ury. In them success draws attention, but the better 
the Post-Office Department is managed the less will be 
said about it. This Department was conducted with 
decided ability by Mr. Blair, and the fewness of com- 
plaints against his administration of it is equivalent to 
high positive praise. 



APPENDIX. 



PROCLAMATION OF EMANCIPATION. 

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, and 
Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby 
proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will 
be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the con- 
stitutional relation between the United States and the people 
thereof in those States in which that relation is, or may be, 
suspended or disturbed ; that it is my purpose upon the next 
meeting of Congress to again recommend the adoption of a 
practical measure tendering pecuniary aid to the free accept- 
ance or rejection of all the Slave States, so-called, the people 
whereof may not then be in rebellion against the United 
States, and which States may then have voluntarily adopted, or 
thereafter may voluntarily adopt, the immediate or gradual 
abolishment of Slavery within their respective limits, and that 
the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their con- 
sent, upon the continent or elsewhere, with the previously 
obtained consent of the government existing there, will be 
continued ; that on the first day of January, in the year of our 
Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons 
held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a 
State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the 
United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and for- 
ever FREE ; and the militaiy and naval authority thereof will 
recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will 
do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in 



186 APPENDIX, 

any efforts they may make for actual freedom; that the Ex- 
ecutive will, on the first day of Jauuaiy aforesaid, by procla- 
mation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in 
which the people thereof respectively shall then be in rebellion 
against the United States ; and the fact that any State, or the 
people thereof, shall on that day be in good faith represented 
in the Congress of the United States by members chosen 
thereto, at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters 
of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of 
strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence 
that such State and the people thereof have not been in rebel- 
lion against the United States. 

That attention is hereby called to an act of Congress en- 
titled, " An act to make an additional article of war," approved 
March 13, 1802, and which act is in the words and figures fol- 
lowing : 

" Be it enmied by the Senate and House of Bepresentatkes of 
the United States of A?nerica, in Congress, asseriibUd, That here- 
after the following shall be promulgated as an additional article 
of war for the government of the Army of the United States, 
and shall be observed and obeyed as such : 

" Article — . All officers or persons of the military or naval 
service of the United States are prohibited from employing any 
of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose 
of returning fugitives from service or labor who may have 
escaped from any persons to whom such service or labor is 
claimed to be due, and any officer who shall be found guilty by 
a court-martial of violating this article, shall be dismissed from 
the service. 

" Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, that this act shall take 
effect from and after its passage." 

Also to the ninth and tenth sections of an act entitled, " An 
act to suppress insurrection, to punish treason and rebellion, to 
seize and confiscate property of Rebels, and for other purposes," 
approved July 17, 1862, and which sections are in the words 
and figures following : 

" Sec. 9. And be it further enacted, that all slaves of persons 
who shall hereafter be engaged in rebellion against the Govern- 



APPENDIX. 187 

rneut of the United States, or who shall in any way give aid or 
comfort thereto, escaping from such persons and taking refuge 
within the lines of the army; and all slaves captured from such 
persons or deserted by them, and coming under the control of 
the Government of the United States, and all slaves of such 
persons found on (or being within) any place occupied by Rebel 
forces and afterward occupied by the forces of the United 
States, shall be deemed captives of war, and shall be forever 
free of their servitude and not again held as slaves. 

" Sec. 10. And be it further enacted, that no slave escaping 
into any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, from any 
of the States, shall be delivered up, or in any way impeded or 
hindered of his liberty, except for crime, or some offense against 
the laws, unless the person claiming said fugitive shall first 
make oath that the person to whom the labor or service of such 
fugitive is alleged to be due, is his lawful owner, and has not 
been in arms against the United States in the present rebellion, 
nor in any way given aid or comfort thereto ; and no person 
engaged in the military or naval service of the United States 
shall, under any pretense whatever, assume to decide on the 
validity of the claim of any person to the service or labor of 
any other person, or surrender up any such person to the claim- 
ant, on pain of being dismissed from the service." 

And I do hereby enjoin upon, and order all persons engaged 
in the military and naval service of the United States to ob- 
serve, obey, and enforce within their respective spheres of serv- 
ice the act and sections above recited. 

And the Executive will, in due time, recommend that all citi- 
zens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto 
throughout the rebellion, shall (upon the restoration of the 
constitutional relation between tluc United States and their re- 
spective States and people, if the relation shall have been sus- 
pended or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of 
the United States,'including the loss of slaves. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused 
the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the city of "Washington, this twenty-sd'cond day of 
September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred 



188 APPENDIX. 

and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States 
the eighty-seventh. 

By the President : ATtnATTA^ Lincoln. 

Wm. H. Sewakd, Secretary of State. 



SUPPLEMENTARY PROCLAMATION. 

"Whekeas, On the twenty-second day of September, in the 
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a 
proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, 
containing among other things, the following, to wit : 

That on the first day of Januaiy, in the year of our Lord one 
thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as 
slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the 
people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United 
States, shall be thenceforward and forever free, and the Execu- 
tive Government of the United States, including the military 
and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the 
freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress 
such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for 
their actual freedom : 

That the Executive will, on the first day of January afore- 
said, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, 
if any, in which the people thereof respectively shall then be 
in rebellion against the United States, and the fact that any 
State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be in good faith 
represented in the Congress of the United States by members 
chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified 
voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence 
of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evi- 
dence that such State and the people thereof are not then in 
rebellion against the United States : 

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United 
States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in- 
chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in time of 



APPENDIX. 189 

actual armed rebellion against the authority and Government 
of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for 
repressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the 
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, 
and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly pro- 
claimed for the full period of one hundred days from the day 
of the first above-mentioned order, and designate, as the States 
and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively are 
this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, 
to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, except the parishes of St. 
Bernard, Plaquemine, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, 
Ascension, Assumption, Terre Bonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. 
Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans, Mis- 
sissippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North 
Carolina, and Virginia, except the forty-eight counties desig- 
nated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, 
Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, 
and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, 
and which excepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as 
if this proclamation were not issued. 

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I 
do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said 
designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward 
shall be free ; and that the Executive Government of the United 
States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will 
recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. 

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free, 
to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense, 
and I recommend to them, that in all cases, when allowed, they 
labor faithfully for reasonable wages. 

And I further declare and make known that such persons of 
suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the 
United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other 
places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. 

And upon this, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, 
warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I in- 
voke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious 
favor of Ahnighty God. 



190 APPENDIX. 

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused 
the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the city of Washington, this first day of 
January, in the year of our Lord one tliousand 
[l, s.] eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Indepen- 
dence of the United States of America, the eighty- 
seventh. 
By the President : ♦ ' Abraham Lincoln. 

William H. Seward, Secretary of State. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

THE STANDARD PORTRAIT-NOW READY. 

PAINTED FKOM LIFE, AT THE WHITE HOUSE, IN 1864, 

BY F. B. CARPENTER. 

ji.7id Magnificently reproduced on Steel, in Line and Stipple, 
BY F. HALPIN. 

SIZE OP SHEET, 24 BY 30 INCHES. 

For six months Mr. Carpenter was an inmate of the White House, study- 
ing the countenance and character of President Lincoln. His great painting, 

"The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation," 

engraved upon Steel by A. H. Ritchie, of which engraving thousands have 
been sold, with an increased demand since the reduction in price bv the un- 
dersigned ; and his book, ''SIX MONTHS AT THE WHITE HOUSE," at- 
test the closeness of his intercourse with Mr. Lincoln and the fidelity of his 
study. Carpenter's " Lincoln" must soon become a household word. It is 
THE FAVORITE PORTE AIT OF THE LINCOLN FAMILY. 

The following distinguished persons were painted from life by Mr. Carpen- 
ter : Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, John Tyler, Wm. L. Marcv, Wm. 
H. SeXvard, Lewis Cass, Salmon P. Chase, Sam Houston, Edwin M. S'tanton, 
Gideon Welles, Schu)ier Colfax, Edward Bate<?, Caleb Cushing, Montgomery 
Blair, John C. Fremont, Horace Greeley, Gov. Myron II. Clark, Judge Stenhen 
J. Field, Dr. Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Eev. Drs. Cos, F'ield, 
Storrs, Bacon, Bushnell, John Pierpout, and many others. * 

From the Publisher of the ''New Ywk Tribune.''' 

I well remember the occasion of Mr. Lincoln's sitting to you, at which I 
was present. * * * Mr. Lincoln then made this remark : " I feel that 
there is more of me in this portrait than in any representation which has 
ever been made." I think these were his very wbrds. 

Truly yours, SAMUEL SINCLAIR. 

From Mrs. Lincoln. 

F. B. Carpenter : My Dear Sir— * * * j write you to-day to thank you 
for the most perfect likeness of my beloved husband that I have ever seen. 
The resemblance is so accurate in Mr. Haipin's engraving that it will require 
far more calmness than I can now command to have it placed continually be- 
fore me. * * * Very truly your friend, MARY LINCOLN. 
From Mr. Robert T. Lincoln. 

Mr. F. B. Carpenter: My Dear Sir— 1 received your letter and engraving 
several days ago, and I beg you to excuse my delay in acknowledging your 
kindness. Mr. Halpin has had most extraordinary success in engraving your 
portrait of my father, and has made the best likeness that I have seen. 'l do 
not know that I can express my idea of it better than by saying that I am per- 
fectly satisfied with it as a likeness. Mr. Marshall made a very good picture, 
but there is something unsatisfactory about it which I can not explain, and 
I would have no hesitation in choosing between the two. Mr. Fuller, one of 
the gentlemen in Avhosc otfice I am studying, who was an old personal friend 
of my father, was about purchasing Marshall's portrait, but on seeing this, 
immediately said that yours was the one he wanted. Speaking on the sub- 
ject a day or two afterward, he said that vour picture left a satisfied impres- 
sion on his mind, which Marshall's, tliough pleasing while he was looking at 
it, did not. I mention this to show what is thought of your engraving by the 
only one of my father's personal friends who has seen it. * * * Please ac- 
cept my thanks, and my heartiest wishes for the success which vour work 
merits. Very sincerely yours, ROBERT T. LINCOLN. 

From Hon. Wm. H. HERNDON,/or twenty years Mr. Lincoln's laiv-partner. 

Mr. F. B. Carpenter : 3Iy Dear Sir— * * * i received per express, 
yesterday morning, your admirable and exquisite engraving by Halpin. 
When I opened the box and unrolled the portrait, Mr. lAi\c.o\wJlashed on me 
as never from picture. As a portrait— a likeness— it is Lincoln. His head 
rests naturally, easily, symmetrically on his shoulders ; his hair parted upon 



V 



the proper Bide, the side he chose to part it on. * * * Ilrfooks to me and 
ts a better portrait and likeness than Marshall's. It seems to me to be a supe- 
rior work of art. If art is perfection of likeness and exquisite culture of 
execution, then I give your picture the decided preference. ♦ * * Now let 
me give you a thousand thanks. Your friend, W. H. HERNDON. 

A Testimonial from New York Sted Plate Engravers. 
Mr. FHalpin, Engraver, etc.: Dear Sir— Yom have called our attention 
to a oird over the signature of Ticknor & Fields, containing an unwarrant- 
able fling at the character of your engraving of Carpenter's Lincoln— the ob- 
ject of which is patent upon its face. This attack, as you say, provokes a 
reply, and at j-our request, we have examined Marshall's engraving of Lin- 



memory is powerless to restore," yet after a careful examination, we unhes- 
itatingly say that your engraving of Lincoln is the finest and most artistic 
piece of portraiture-engraving ever executed on this continent, and is decid- 
edly superior to Marshall's engraving of Lincoln, published by Ticknor & 

' >r ^^r ' ^ ^^y ^'^^^ without any unfriendly feeling toward Ticknor & Fields 
or Mr. Marshall, but simply as an act of justice to vou, and also that the pub- 
lic, w-ho are not judges of engraving, may understand the facts in the case. 

A. H. Ritchie, J. C. Buttre, George E. Ferine, G. W. Posselwhite, Charles 
T. Giles, N. Lott, W. L. Titsworth, Wm. Murray, and others. 

From the Uok. Robekt Dale Owex, aidhor of the fortJicoming " Life and 
Tin^s of Abraham Lincoln.'''' 

F. B. Carpenteh, Esq. : My Dear Sir— You expressed a desire that I should 
give you my opinion of the comparative merits of your engraved portrait of 
our late President, just published, and that previously oflered to the public 
by Mr. Marshall. Last evening, at the house of a friend, I had, for the first 
time, an opportunity of placing side by side the two likenesses. 

My opinion, even if it seems presumptuous, so to express it, is, that your 
portrait of Mr. Lincoln, as presented by Halpin. is the most faithful repre- 
sentation that has ever been or (now that death has taken from us the original) 
ever will be executed, of one among the best and greatest men who in any 
age ever occupied a positioh so exalted as that to which our late chief mag- 
istrate was called. 

Mr. Marshall's likeness, finished work of art as it is, does not bring up be- 
fore my mind any vivid recollection of Mr. Lincoln as I knew him. Most 
persons may say that it represents a handsomer man than your embodiment 
does. It IS not handsomer to me. The strong, somewhat rugged features, 
the sad, dreamy eyes, even the coarse, rebellious hair, are all so associated for 
mc with the noble qualities of the man, that I prefer them just as they were, 
to any smoother or more conventional a rendition of them. 

I intend, in thus speaking, no expression of opinion touching the compar- 
ative merits of the two artists. Ruskin has well said that it behooves qn art- 
ist to stud}% not Rafaelle, but what Rafaelle studied. No copies of nature 
can supersede the teachings of nature. You had daily before you for months 
the rnan himself— an advantage which no other artist over had. It was fortu- 
nate for you and for the world. Future ages will know as truthfully as pencil 
and graver can tell them, the features, the expression, the idiosyncrasy of 
Abraham Lincoln. I am, my dear sir, faithfully yours, 

„ ^ .,. ROBERT DALE OWEN. 

1 . b.— I am so far a competent judge as to likenesses in this case, that l 
served two years in Congress with Mr. Lincoln, and had some thirty or forty 
interviews with him, during his Presidency, some of them on important 
Bubjects. 

PlilCES : Artist's Proofs, $15 ; India Proofs, $7 75 ; Prints, $4 75. 
J^~ Agents wanted to sell the above everywhere. Sold by Subscription only. 
Address for the East, 

^. J. JOMTVSOIV, I»xil>lisher, 

No. 113 Fulton StbeeT, New York. 
For Ohio and Michigan, F. G. & A. C. ROWE, Qeveland, Ohio. 
For territory farther West, DR. C. ALLEN, Chicago, HI. 



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